CHINA IN LEGEND AND STORY.*
BY adopting the narrative method Mr. Campbell Brown has succeeded in giving within comfortable compass, and in a particularly vivid manner, a picture of China,—"not the willow-pattern country of our conventional ideas, but the living, palpitating, human China." Whether he is dealing with pre- Christian legend or post-Christian fact, the author's treat- ment of his subject is both sympathetic and powerful. His standpoint is neither that of a missionary soliciting pity for an "afflicted people," nor of a traveller describing the picturesque peculiarities of an alien and, by implication, inferior race. It is that of a man who, in the course of ten years' residence among the people of whom he writes, has had occasion to say of many of them, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din"; and if this feeling of fellowship which is so real a thing to him induces in his writing at times a certain sentimentalism, that is perhaps a pardonable fault. One of the most impressive of the legends with which he deals is that descriptive of the laying down of her life by the daughter of the ruler of Chinchew to consummate the rebuilding of the city. He tells us how, unrobed, she faced the sorrowing crowd of citizens, tended the altars, and then laid herself upon the new-built wall to await the will of the gods. The sacrifice was ended and the city redeemed; but the girl, over- come with shame and terror, cast herself from the battlements. The story is not without its parallel in the mythology of other nations, but Mr. Campbell Brown's version of the Chinese legend gives it a pathos all its own. "The tide of human life, heavy with sin and misery, has flowed for centuries without cessation through the ancient streets of Chinchew, but of all the lives that have come and gone in them there has been none more exquisite for sorrow or.for shame than hers. Many have come and gone and been forgotten, but against the darkness of the heathen night the figure of a nameless girl stands out in beauty, and across the ages her agony calls to far Gethsemane." The influence of Christianity on character has seldom been more impressively exemplified than in the tales which compose the latter half of the 'volume; and, in fine, it may be said that the book does much to give one a better understanding of a people who "think and love, labour and sorrow, and grow old as we do."
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