INTRODUCTION.

I.—PERSONAL.—The public has, perhaps, a right to be made acquainted with the title under which I, an unknown writer, come forward as the translator of a difficult Chinese work. In the spring of 1867, I began the study of Chinese at Her Britannic Majesty’s Legation in Peking, under an implied promise in a dispatch from the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that successful efforts would be rewarded by proportionately rapid advancement in the service of which I was a member. Then followed a long novitiate of utterly uninteresting and, indeed, most repellent labor—inseparable, however, from the acquisition of this language, which throughout its early stages demands more from sheer memory than from the exercise of any other intellectual faculty.