The works on Tauism are much better represented in the great Catalogue than those on Buddhism. The Tau-to-king, that incomprehensible text ascribed to Lau-tzi himself, with all its many editions and commentaries, claims, of course, the chief attention of Chinese literary circles. The work has been declared a forgery by Professor Giles, who has also translated that most important Tauist work of the philosopher Chuang-tzi, which may be looked upon as by far the best and most intelligible exponent of early Tauism. All together the Imperial Catalogue discusses 144 works under the head of "Tauism."
To do justice to the last and by far the most voluminous among the "Four Treasuries," that of Belles-Lettres, with the polite Literature of the Chinese, I should have been obliged to set insufficient store by the Classics, the Historians, and the Philosophers, more important in shaping the Chinese national character, though perhaps less interesting from the foreign point of view. Of its five subdivisions the first deals with the so-called "Elegies of Ch'u," because they take precedence on account of their high antiquity. Their author, K'ii Yiian, had been the intimate friend and adviser of his sovereign, the King of Ch'u, a large and powerful country on the banks of the Yang-tzi, about 314 b.c, but fell into disgrace through the unjust denouncement of a set of jealous courtiers. His melancholy outbursts of feeling over the unjustness of his fate formed the subject of a poem by him, entitled "Li-sau," "Incurring Misfortune," or "Under a Cloud." When his enemies continued their persecutions, he drowned himself. This sad event is commemorated throughout China on the anniversary of its occurrence in the midsummer by a kind of regatta known as the dragon-boat festival. K'ii Yiian's world-weariness, traces of which may be discovered in the early ballads of the still more ancient "Canon of Odes" as well as in later poems, may be due to a kind of emotional susceptibility that we may even now have occasion to observe as a characteristic among
