first drawn to the existence of such a country during his visit to Bactria in 127 B.C., would not have been regarded as a discovery. The traces of Indian lore found in Chinese Literature in the works of certain post-Confucian writers must, therefore, either have soaked through that impenetrable wall of the Tibetan highlands, or the deserts of Eastern Turkestan, or have originated in prehistoric times. Certainly, part of the Literature which the Chinese themselves consider their best, the so-called "Chinese Classics," cannot be said to have been influenced from any quarter.
This very term, "Chinese Classics," invented by foreigners to designate the standard works of Confucianism, assigns to Chinese Literature a distinctive character. If we speak of English, French, or German classics, we think of works of poetry. The Chinese apply a different scale to the estimation of their Literature. The names which may be said to stand first in English Literature, Shakspere and Milton were those of poets; so were the names of Schiller and Goethe in Germany, of Petrarch and Dante in Italy, and of Calderon and Cervantes in Spain. The Chinese are probably quite as fond of their great poets as we are of ours; but as the first representatives of their Literature they would never hesitate to point to Confucius and Lau-tzi, thinkers but not poets. All together, the Chinese classification of Literature differs a great deal from ours, and it will be worth our while to say a few words on that subject.
The Chinese do not possess any work which might be called "a history of Chinese Literature." To make up for this deficiency, however, they possess catalogues of standard Literature as represented in their Imperial libraries. The oldest of these catalogues was the one of the Imperial collection of the earlier Han dynasty, which was destroyed by fire during the insurrection of the usurper Wang-mang, about nineteen hundred years ago. It consists mainly of a list of books, by more than six hundred authors, arranged with some kind
