hunger, endowed with health sufficient to enable him simply to enjoy the sense of living, and of living too in a land so perfect, that a human being ought to be happy in the privilege of residing there at all. It is a land, so they seem to suppose, wherein everything is settled and ordered by men who know exactly what they ought to know, and who are paid to keep people from rising, or ambitiously seeking to quit the groove in which Providence placed them at their birth. Many will say that the Chinaman is not without ambition, and in a sense they will be right. Parents are ambitious to educate their children, and to qualify them for candidature at the Government exam- inations; and there are probably no men who lust more after power, wealth and place than the successful Chinese graduates, simply because they know that there is no limit to their pros- pects. If they have interest and genius, the poorest of them may fairly aspire to become a member of the Imperial Cabinet ; but then these are the men of letters, and not the poor labour- ing classes, the populace whom I have just described.
Before I quit Canton I must give some account of a spot there, which I visited more than once, and which was commonly known as the garden of Pun-ting-qua. Pun-ting-qua, or Pun-shi-cheng, the original owner, had been a wealthy merchant at Canton, but his Government ultimately drained him of his wealth, by compelling him to pay a certain fixed sum for the monopoly of trade in salt. Falling into heavy arrears, and being unable to raise the amount, his property was sequestrated, and his splendid garden raffled in a public lottery. A notable instance, this, of the danger of becoming too rich in China. His house, a singularly beautiful place, was sold to the anti-foreign, anti- missionary society of Canton; and at the time of my visit to this quaint pleasure-ground, traces of decay had already set
