half dozen? When he wrote the first time, you knew he had no right to do so. Why did you not report him? He says you were hoping to make better terms with him." The governor rejoined: "It is the custom for viceroys and governors to correspond with local men at Peking, and, though it may be wrong, I am not one of those who pretend to goodygoody perfection. I simply wished to oblige him as a local man; but when he asked me to let him off scot-free, I gave him a piece of my mind. Anyhow, no one can say I am corrupt in money matters; and even if I was such an idiot as to try and make terms, I am at least not such an idiot as to leave six letters on record, as he did." This viceroy was totally fearless, and I subsequently had very close relations with him. He has innumerable faults which a censor might fairly denounce, but he is so honest and courageous that the emperor cannot well forego his services.

Sometimes treasurers and judges, who as a rule only address the throne on taking up and abandoning office, and on imperial birthdays, may denounce their superiors, the viceroy or governor. This has happened several times at Canton; in one case they had the governor degraded for giving a feast during the time of imperial mourning; and when I was there in 1875, the Manchu viceroy, Yinghan, was summarily removed for encouraging gambling, on the application of the Chinese governor and Manchu general. Very few high officials can write their own memorials, or care to do so if they can. Yet they are held severely responsible for any slips in grammar, etiquette, or tact which their secretaries may make. Manchus always style themselves "slave," whilst Chinese use the word "subject;" for some unexplained reason certain Chinese military officers also use the word "slave." The highest provincial official is the Manchu general (where there is one); the next the viceroy, whether Manchu or Chinese; or, if no viceroy, the governor. Memorials are in most cases returned in original, with the original rescript endorsed thereon;

copies are made and kept at Peking, so that each side keeps the version it is responsible for, and tampering with documents is thus impossible.

Official despatches are conveyed through a service organized by the Board of War, and on arrival are placed in a locked box at the Transmission Office; a eunuch takes this box to the emperor, who alone possesses the key. The emperor sometimes endorses his minute at once, but usually he reserves his decision until the Cabinet officers appear, at 3 A.M. The empress, when regent, had a regular system of thumbnail rescripts; not because she could not write, but because this method saved trouble. The Inner Council then instantly copies the reports, whilst the "junior lords" of the Cabinet submit fair copies of the proposed decree. The Grand Secretariat is the depository for the copies of memorials and endorsements. Memorials are sent to Peking in flat wooden cases, fitted with spring locks, which can only be used once. A stock of them is periodically supplied by the Peking Board. The emperor returns the original box, with the original document simply wrapped up, not locked, in it, and all old boxes and envelopes have to be ultimately returned respectfully to Peking, duly numbered. The couriers travel with the despatches strapped to the back, and are escorted by the official who sends the documents as far as the third inner gate; the grand central portal is then thrown open, and off rides the courier, to a salute of six guns. Ordinary letters go easily "by post," i.e., by comfortable stages of thirty miles a day. The order to "go one hundred and thirty miles (or one hundred and fifty miles) a day" is merely formal, and simply means that all speed, without incurring extra expense, is to be made. On the rare occasions when two hundred miles a day are ordered, the same courier is expected to travel even six days without stopping more than a minute or two at a time; three such successful rides entitle him to the lowest official button. The most rapid journey ever ordered is two hundred

and sixty miles a day, and the man who accomplishes it for long distances is pensioned for life. (Chinese pensions, however, tend to exiguity.) When Canton was taken by our troops, the news

reached Peking in six days, and the reconquest of Kashgaria in 1878, took very little more to report. On the great western highroad there are now 2,680 post-horses and 1,340 post-boys. Previous to the Yakoob Beg rebellion there were nearly three times these numbers, but the Kan Suh province has for long been somewhat disorganized.

To return to our reports. Each important document would be on the average quite as long as the whole of this paper, so that it will readily be seen that we cannot give full examples. As with the decrees, so with the reports,-many occur daily; others weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Daily ones-not daily from each province, but appearing almost every day—are such as propose promotions and transfers; report the rehearing of appeal cases; announce the despatch of funds to Peking; apply for cases of the imperial approval in marked filial piety, and so on. But their nature can be best judged by the light of the decrees and rescripts, of which instances have been given above.

E. H. PARKER.

P.S.-Since writing the above, I have received a Gazette containing a very curious memorial from the Dalai Lama

of Tibet, an exalted ecclesiastical functionary analogous to the pope of Rome, except that the Manchu emperors, whilst recognizing his spiritual claims, insist upon his keeping to his proper temporal place.

Petty priest that I am, in obedience to the precedents followed by my predecessors, I descend from my mountain seat, and, having selected a propitious day, proceed to the Great Temple to hold a full choral service on all occasions upon whic] the territories subject to Tibetan rule are found free from temporal afflictions, with a view to somewhat relieving my loyal cares by offering devout prayers for the peace and long life of his Majesty the Emperor, and the tranquillity of the world

in general. Thanks to the felicitous ægis of our Sacred Master, Tibetan territory is now free from any plague of sickness, and all remains at peace. Accordingly, my private vicar-general and preceptor has selected the 23rd of February, 1896, aş an auspicious day upon which I, petty priest that I am, am to proceed in person, at the head of the whole ecclesiastical bodies of the three chief Lhasa temples, to the Great Metropolitan Temple, there to hold solemn service, and to offer up special prayers for our Sacred Master's long life and prosperity, and for the welfare of his people.

The above was received through K'weihwan, Manchu resident in Tibet. An imperial rescript was received as follows: "Let the department concerned take due note." By the emperor.

In view of the revolution now taking place in Tibet, the above official definition of the relations between the Buddhist pope and the emperor of China is interesting. E. H. P.

From The Fortnightly Review. "SIR GEORGE TRESSADY" AND THE

POLITICAL NOVEL.

Critics of authority assure us, and we all repeat after them, that the nineteenth century has found its distinctive and characteristic medium of expression in the novel. Politicians tell us, therein perhaps a little magnifying their office, but still with substantial truth, that, next to sport, the subject which enlists the greatest interest of

the greatest number of Englishmen is that of politics. Yet of all forms of nineteenth-century fiction, the political novel is the most rarely attempted, and very much the most rarely attempted with success. It would almost seem as if this peculiar literary genre-popular and attractive to the literary artists as, for the reasons above set forth, we should have supposed it to be had perished with its inventor. More than fifty years have passed since the young Benjamin Disraeli startled, half scandalized, and wholly delighted his then

contemporary world of letters and politics with the first of three novels, which a quarter of a century later he described as “forming a real trilogy," having for their motive the exhibition of (1), "the origin and character of our political parties;" (2), “their influence on the moral and physical condition of the people;" and (3), “the means by which that condition could be elevated and improved." The first member of this trilogy was "Coningsby;" the second, "Sybil;" the third "Tancred." All three, but the first two in particular, were brilliantly successful with at any rate the educated and informed public of their time; they were recognized, consciously or unconsciously, as new and happy experiments; they are admired, quoted, and even read to this day. Yet, though half a century has elapsed since their appearance, they still occupy a place by themselves in literature. They are not only the first in their class, but they are almost alone in it. Nec viget quicquam simile aut secundum. Even the claimants for a place in that class during the fifty years' interval may be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Of course, no formidable rival of Disraeli was to be reasonably expected. The peculiar combination of gifts and advantages to which his extraordinary success was due will possibly never repeat itself: assuredly it is not likely to recur except at cometary intervals. We may get again-perhaps unknown to ourselves we have already had again among us-that happy compound of youth, wit, audacity, and impertinence which gives to his political novels their complex charm. But we can no more restore the political and social conditions under which he wrote than we could re-create his personality, and surround it with the peculiar environment amid which it developed. One of the wholly irreproducible conditions of the Thirties and Forties was that political, like fashionable, "society," and indeed the two terms were to a large extent convertible-was a numerically small body, with characteristics, like those of all exclusive coteries, proportionately

well marked; and that Disraeli had, for him, the great good fortune of not having been born in、o that society, and yet obtaining such early opportunities of observing it from within-if from only just within-its portals, as to enable his quick satiric observation to master its types, its language, and its ideas by the time, or more probably much before the time, when his brilliantly effective literary faculty had fully matured. His own account of those experiences, given with that mixture of pomp and naïveté which has so delightful a relish when you have once acquired the taste for it, is to be found in a well-known paper in the introduction to the "Hughenden" edition of his novels, published in 1870. "Born in a library," he wrote, "and trained from early childhood by learned men who did not share the passions and prejudices of our political and social life, I had imbibed on some subjects conclusions different from those which generally prevail, and especially with reference to the history of our own country." This, if I may be allowed to quote certain previously published remarks of my own on the same subject, "was no common advantage in a day when strait was the gate and narrow the way that led through public school and university to political distinction, but when those who took that route found that the high walls which on either hand kept out competitors proportionately obstructed their own view of the world in which they lived. It was from the heart of this outer world that the young Disraeli made a way for himself into the sacred avenue by dint of an inborn power which would not be denied recognition, and a native audacity which did not know the meaning of rebuff. Once there, he was able to survey the scene of petty strife and ignoble ambition around him with a critical detachment which was impossible to his rivals, and with larger, other eyes' than theirs."

These advantages, however, of origin and training, and exceptional mode of entrance into public life, were not the only valuable superadditions to the "dæmonic" element in Disraeli's nature.

novel who have appeared in the course of the intervening half-century have been much more fortunate in their era. The most notable among them was undoubtedly Mr. Anthony Trollope: but "Phineas Finn" is a truly disastrous attempt. As one looks back upon the period of that novel, and recalls the class of politicians who at that time filled the stage, and among whom the "jaunty Viscount" was a mere picturesque survival, one feels it only just to admit that Mr. Trollope was not fortunate in the particular political life which he had undertaken to depict, or in the models from which he drew. Still the time of the second reform movement was distinctly a stirring time. Its dramatic quality was keenly felt by those who were of sufficiently mature age to be interested in politics without having yet become acutely critical of politicians; and one might have thought that a practised storyteller would have succeeded in getting some of the stir and passion of the time into his pages. But Mr. Trollope, though a practised and indeed a highly popular story-teller, was not one of that kind. He was so little of a politician that he seems not even to have felt the excitement of a struggle which agitated many in those days who paid scant attention to the ordinary political controversies of the period. "Phineas Finn," though published in 1869, but two years after the "shooting of Niagara," shows no traces of anything of the kind. There is not even Wordsworth's doubtful basis of the poetic, "Emotion recollected in Tranquillity;" while, on the other hand, the author's perfect frigidity of temper has not added to the penetration of his glance. The hero, otherwise a poor creature enough, is interesting as a "document" -a specimen of the Irish member of the pre-Parnellite day; but the political magnates of the novel, from Mr. Mildmay, downwards, are painfully wooden, and its whole political "business" is quite pathetically dull.

By far the most serious attempt at a political novel which has been adventured since Disraeli's time, is that

which has just been made by the accomplished author of "Robert Elsmere." Perhaps the word "serious" may not seem a very apt adjective to apply to the spirited enterprise which has borne fruit in "Sir George Tressady;" but the truth is that it is only too appropriate. "Sir George Tressady" is a serious-a very serious-effort in a department of fiction in which to be too serious-or at any rate to be nothing besides serious -is inevitably to miss complete success; and the first and most potent cause of Mrs. Ward's comparative failure as a political novelist is to be found in her lack of humor. She takes all her characters-her hero and heroine (above all, her heroine), her ministers, her Opposition leaders, her Parliamentary orators, her "labor members"-as seriously as she has always (quite justifiably) taken herself and her art; and the result, to those of her readers who have had a near vision of the politics and seen most of the leading political actors off the stage, is to give an idealized air to scenes and portraits which are nothing if not realistic, and which were obviously meant for examples of the most conscientious realism. The disappointment is all the greater because Mrs. Ward undoubtedly describes and recounts as one who knows. She has herself, doubtless, had some such near view of politics and sight of the leading political actor with his "paint and spangles off," as might have enabled many a writer of less ability to add those satiric touches to their portraits which would have made them human. Quite possibly she may know as well as her critics where these touches should have come in; she is quite observer enough to know; but if so, it is to be supposed that she could not find it in her heart to put them in. Such is the deadly earnestness of her "views," that she must find mouth-pieces for themand, of course, for the opposite views too-who will do them justice; and if appropriate spokesmen and spokeswomen are not to be found in characters realistically sketched from life, so much the worse for life and realism. The characters must be idealized, that is all;