GLIMPSES OF THE WONDErful.

A GLANCE AT CHINA.

THE Macedonian king, when he had reached the banks of the Indus, wept like a spoiled child at the belief that he should soon have no more worlds to conquer. He knew not that far beyond the Ganges, whose sacred stream he never visited, was a vast region, more populous, more civilized, and more wealthy than any of those which his armies, in their rapid march from the Hellespont, eastward, to the swift Hydaspes, had overrun. Two hundred years before the era of Alexander the Great flourished Coon-footse, or, as he is known to Europeans, Confucius, the sage and lawgiver of China, and the contemporary of Herodotus, the father of Grecian history. And for centuries before the time of Confucius had the Chinese empire existed; counting far back her rulers and her dynasties, till the truth of history was lost in a mist of mytholgical ex

aggeration, which absurdly claims for the "Celestial Empire"-as the Chinese fondly term their country-a date some centuries previous to the time fixed by Moses for the creation of man. This, however, the more enlightened among themselves are content to consider fabulous.

The simple truth is sufficiently wonderful without resorting to fable; for strange indeed it is that a mighty empire should have flourished, whose very name was for centuries a mystery to the nations of the West, and whose existence was sometimes treated as a chimera.

For more than twenty centuries China appears to have attained nearly the same degree of civilization and advancement in arts, sciences, and government which now so favorably distinguish it from other Asiatic nations; and there it appears to have been nearly stationary. While the "outside barbarians" of the West have been struggling, century after century, out of the darkness and ignorance and brutality of their forefathers, the Chinese, content with the wisdom, the discoveries, and the precepts that so justly distinguished the remote antiquity of their empire, have hitherto shared but little in the mighty changes, whether for good or evil, which have passed over the face of the earth.

The doctrines of Christianity made but little progress

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amid the millions of the Celestial empire; the Jesuits being for a long period the only possessors of the Christian religion that obtained an entrance, and they were admitted, not as teachers of another faith, but as astronomers, astrologers, and mathematicians. Mahomet appeared upon the scene, and shook the thrones of half the known world. The faith he preached spread from Arabia, and overflowed all lands, from the Straits of Gibraltar in the West to Central Asia in the East; triumphing alike over the dead and corrupted forms of superstition, that in the sixth century usurped the name of Christianity—over the tenets of Zoroaster, which still lingered amid the fire-worshippers of Persia-over Bramah and the subject idols of Hindostan. But while thrones and religions thus fell before the sword of Islam, the doctrines of Confucius retained their sway undisturbed throughout the extent of China.

The Tartars of Central Asia, they whose kindred at different periods and under different names have ravaged the most fertile and populous regions of Europe and Asia, have twice invaded China, and seated a Tartar dynasty upon the throne of Pekin; and the present Emperor of China is the sixth descendant of the Manchou Tartar chief who conquered China in 1643. But though a Tartar race may rule, China and the Chinese remain essentially un

changed; the religion, the manners, the very name even of the conquerors is absorbed and all but lost in those of the conquered the Tartar becomes Chinese; and while the unwarlike nature and peaceable and industrious habits of this remarkable people appear to render them an easy prey to the brute force of a handful of invaders, their immense numbers, the general diffusion of education among them, the profound reverence and attachment to the laws, language, and customs of their ancestors-fostered from earliest infancy-these and other causes ensure their essential independence as a nation, and enable them to retain, by a species of passive resistance and conservative inertia, all their national characteristics unchanged through the lapse of ages.

Lord Brougham, in his striking way, has summed up the most remarkable features in the character and history of the Chinese. "A territory of enormous extent, stretching 1400 miles from east to west, and as many from north to south-peopled by above three hundred millions of persons, all living under one sovereign-preserving their customs for a period far beyond the beginning of authentic history elsewhere-civilized when Europe was sunk in barbarism-possessed, many centuries before ourselves, of the arts which we deem the principal triumphs of civiliza

tion, and even yet not equalled by the industry and enterprise of the West in the prodigious extent of their public works-with a huge wall 1500 miles in length, built 2000 years ago, and a canal of 700, four centuries before any canal had ever been known in Europe, the sight of such a country and such a nation is mightily calculated to fix the attention of the most careless observer, and to warm the fancy of the most indifferent. But there are yet more things unfolded in the same quarter to the eye of the political philosopher.

"All this vast empire under a single head; its countless myriads of people yielding an obedience so regular and so mechanical, that the government is exercised as if the control were over animals or masses of inert matter; the military force at the ruler's disposal so insignificant, that the mere physical pressure of the crowd must instantly destroy it were the least resistance attempted :-the people all this while, not only not plunged in rude ignorance, but more generally possessed of knowledge, to a certain extent, and more highly prizing it than any other nation in the world: the institutions of the country established for much above five-and-twenty centuries, and never changing or varying (in principle at least) during that vast period of time-the inhabitants, with all their refinement and