PREFACE.

Most of the songs in this collection have already appeared in print, but I am tempted to publish them in this form from the fact that the subjects must be new and strange to most people in England, and many of them, I feel confident, are novel even to foreigners in China.

Many songs that I have translated are not even in Chinese print; but I have been attracted by hearing them sung in the streets, made the singers come to my house and sing them while my teacher wrote them down verbatim ; this process being repeated till I was assured that they were correct. By this means I not only got the words of the song, but the air, and I fancied I could also grasp the ideas they conveyed.

In regard to the translation of them, some I have rendered freely in whatever metre I thought would suit the

subject; others I have rendered almost word for word with the Chinese; the object in all cases being to render the idea in a suitable manner. Without entering more fully into particulars, the reader will at a glance detect the difference.

My object has also been to embrace a variety of subjects. Some songs might have been omitted as inferior in language, thought and feeling, had the object been merely to present a collection of only the gems of Chinese fancy; but having it rather in view to show the difference of their poetic subjects and styles, it seemed to me they ought to be included in such a collection as the present.

I need not say that in Chinese literature there is an inexhaustible field for the historian, the novelist, the dramatist, and the poet. Some of these departments have been diligently cultivated by minds fitly trained and amply furnished for the task; but, so far as my knowledge goes, the songs of the people, redolent as they necessarily are of the deepest and most wide-spread tendencies of natural thought, have hitherto been comparatively neglected. It is also hoped that the student of popular poetry will here find matter worthy of his attention. Now that so much interest has been awakened in such subjects by the collections of Mr. Henderson, Mr. Wilkinson, and Mr. Coxe in England; by Miss Frere and Mr. Gover in India; by

the works of MM. Edélyi, Török, Gyulai, and Arany in Hungary; by Asbjörnsen's interesting stories of Norway; by Afansief's numerous fables of Russia; and most especially by the labours of Grimm, and the important contributions to this branch of literature so recently furnished by the learned Felix Liebrecht ;-I have felt that some real translations of Chinese popular song would not be without their value as illustrations of the mental status of an important section of the human family.

With these few words of explanation, I launch my little volume in its strange attire on the sea of public opinion. It has at least the merit of being an attempt to bring the ideas and feelings of a distant and strange race before the public. If it succeeds, I shall congratulate myself on having had a front place among the pioneers who have opened up the lighter and more amusing literature of China.

G. C. S.

SHANGHAI: 6th September, 1873.