Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi,
Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,
Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,
Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes,
Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo.
But side by side with sages and heroes of antiquity, with mythical and mythological personages, we find General Tcheng Ki-tong, Mr. Ku Hung-ming, Viceroy Chang Chi-tung and Captain Lew Buah,—the last whose sole title to distinction is that he used often to treat his foreign friends with unlimited quantities of champagne!
Lastly these "Adversaria,"—Dr. Giles latest publication—will not, I am afraid, enhance Dr. Giles reputation as a scholar of sense and judgment. The subjects chosen, for the most part, have no earthly practical or human interest. It would really seem that Dr. Giles has taken the trouble to write these books not with any intention to tell the world anything about the Chinese and their literature but to show what a learned Chinese scholar Dr. Giles is and how much better he understands Chinese than anybody else. Moreover, Dr. Giles, here as elsewhere, shows a harsh and pugnacious dogmatism which is as unphilosophical, as unbecoming a scholar as it is unpleasing. It is these characteristics of sinologues like Dr. Giles which have made, as Mr. Hopkins says, the very name of sinologue and Chinese scholarship a byword and scorn among practical foreign residents in the Far East.
