The next historical epoch is that of Ssu-ma Kuang, a leading statesman and scholar of the eleventh century A.D., who, after nineteen years of continuous labour, produced a general history of China, in the form of a chronological narrative, beginning with the fourth century B.C. and ending with the middle of the tenth century A.D.  This work, which is popularly known as The Mirror of History, and is quite independent of the dynastic histories, fills thirty-three of our large bound-up volumes.

There is a quaint passage in the old man’s Preface, dated 1084, and addressed to the Emperor:—­

“Your servant’s physical strength is now relaxed; his eyes are short-sighted and dim; of his teeth but a few remain.  His memory is so impaired that the events of the moment are forgotten as he turns away from them, his energies having been wholly exhausted in the production of this book.  He therefore hopes that your Majesty will pardon his vain attempt for the sake of his loyal intention, and in moments of leisure will deign to cast the Sacred Glance over this work, so as to learn from the rise and fall of former dynasties the secret of the successes and failures of the present hour.  Then, if such knowledge shall be applied for the advantage of the Empire, even though your servant may lay his bones in the Yellow Springs, the aim and ambition of his life will be fulfilled.”

Biography, as we have already seen, is to some extent provided for under the dynastic histories.  Its scope, however, has been limited in later times, so far as the Historiographer’s Department is concerned, to such officials as have been named by Imperial edict for inclusion in the national records.  Consequently, there has always been a vast output of private biographical literature, dealing with the lives of poets, painters, priests, hermits, villains, and others, whose good and evil deeds would have been long since forgotten, like those of the heroes before Agamemnon, but for the care of some enthusiastic biographer.

Among our eight or ten collections of this kind, there is one which deserves a special notice.  This work is entitled Biographies of Eminent Women, and it fills four extra-large volumes, containing 310 lives in all.  The idea of thus immortalising the most deserving of his countrywomen first occurred to a writer named Liu Hsiang, who flourished just before the Christian era.  I am not aware that his original work is still procurable; the present work was based upon one by another writer, of the third century A.D., and is brought down to modern times, being published in 1779.  Each biography is accompanied by a full-page illustration of some scene in which the lady distinguished herself,—­all from the pencil of a well-known artist.

Three good-sized encyclopaedias, uniformly bound up in ninety-eight large volumes, may fairly claim a moment’s notice, not only as evidencing the persistent literary industry of the Chinese, but because they are all three perfect mines of information on subjects of interest to the foreign student.