He is keenly conscious how
derivative his inspiration is:

Verse of my own! why ask so poor a thing,
When I might gather from the garden-ways
Of sunny memory fragrant offering
Of deathless blooms and white unwithering sprays?

Shakspeare had given me an English rose,
And honeysuckle Spenser sweet as dew,
Or I had brought you from that dreamy close
Keats' passion-blossom, or the mystic blue

Star-flower of Shelley's song, or shaken gold
From lilies of the Blessed Damosel,
Or stolen fire from out the scarlet fold
Of Swinburne's poppies. . . .

Yet now that he has played his prelude with so sensitive and so graceful
a touch, we have no doubt that he will pass to larger themes and nobler
subject-matter, and fulfil the hope he expresses in this sextet:

For if perchance some music should be mine,
I would fling forth its notes like a fierce sea,
To wash away the piles of tyranny,
To make love free and faith unbound of creed.
O for some power to fill my shrunken line,
And make a trumpet of my oaten reed.

(1) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)

(2) Venetia Victrix. By Caroline Fitz Gerald. (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) Volumes in Folio. By Richard Le Gallienne. (Elkin Mathews.)

A CHINESE SAGE

(Speaker, February 8, 1890.)

A eminent Oxford theologian once remarked that his only objection to
modern progress was that it progressed forward instead of backward--a
view that so fascinated a certain artistic undergraduate that he promptly
wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of
ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab. I feel sure the Speaker
will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of holding
this dangerous heresy of retrogression. But I must candidly admit that I
have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism of modern
life I have met with for some time is that contained in the writings of
the learned Chuang Tzu, recently translated into the vulgar tongue by Mr.
Herbert Giles, Her Majesty's Consul at Tamsui.

The spread of popular education has no doubt made the name of this great
thinker quite familiar to the general public, but, for the sake of the
few and the over-cultured, I feel it my duty to state definitely who he
was, and to give a brief outline of the character of his philosophy.

Chuang Tzu, whose name must carefully be pronounced as it is not written,
was born in the fourth century before Christ, by the banks of the Yellow
River, in the Flowery Land; and portraits of the wonderful sage seated on
the flying dragon of contemplation may still be found on the simple tea-
trays and pleasing screens of many of our most respectable suburban
households. The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt
often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed
over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If
they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tzu spent
his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out
the uselessness of all useful things. 'Do nothing, and everything will
be done,' was the doctrine which he inherited from his great master Lao
Tzu. To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was
his wicked transcendental aim.