Concerning the virtuous amusements of both old and young.The sit- round games.The masterpiece of the divine Li Tang, and its reception by all, including that same Herbert.
VENERATED SIRE (whose breadth of mind is so well developed as to take for granted boundless filial professions, which, indeed, become vapid by a too frequent reiteration),--Your amiable inquiry as to how the barbarians pass their time, when not employed in affairs of commerce or in worshipping their ancestors, has inspired me to examine the matter more fully.At the same time your pleasantly-composed aphorism that the interior nature of persons does not vary with the colour of their eyes, and that if I searched I should find the old flying kites and the younger kicking feather balls or working embroidery, according to their sex, does not appear to be accurately sustained.
The lesser ones, it is true, engage in a variety of sumptuous handicrafts, such as the scorching of wooden tablets with the semblance of a pattern, and gouging others with sharpened implements into a crude relief; depicting birds and flowers upon the surface of plates, rending leather into shreds, and entwining beaten iron, brass, and copper into a diversity of most ingenious complications; but when I asked a maiden of affectionate and domesticated appearance whether she had yet worked her age-stricken father's coffin-cloth, she said that the subject was one upon which she declined to jest, and rapidly involving herself in a profuse display of emotion, she withdrew, leaving this one aghast.
To enable my mind to retranquillise, I approached a youth of highly- gilded appearance, and, with many predictions of self-inferiority, I suggested that we should engage in the stimulating rivalry of feather ball.When he learned, however, that the diversion consisted in propelling upwards a feather-trimmed chip by striking it against the side of the foot, he candidly replied that he was afraid he had grown out of shuttle-cock,but did not mind, if I was vigorously inclined, "taking me on for a set of yang-pong."Old men here, it is said, do not fly kites, and they affect to despise catching flies for amusement, although they frequently go fishing.Struck by this peculiarity, I put it in the form of an inquiry to one of venerable appearance, why, when at least five score flies were undeniably before his eyes, he preferred to recline for lengthy periods by the side of a stream endeavouring to snare creatures of whose existence he himself had never as yet received any adequate proof.Doubtless in my contemptible ignorance, however, I used some word inaccurately, for those who stood around suffered themselves to become amused, and the one in question replied with no pretence of amiable condescension that the jest had already been better expressed a hundred times, and that I would find the behind parts of a printed leaf called "Punch" in the bookcase.Not being desirous of carrying on a conversation of which I felt that I had misplaced the most highly rectified ingredient, I bowed repeatedly, and replied affably that wisdom ruled his left side and truth his right.
It was upon this same occasion that a young man of unprejudiced wide-mindedness, taking me aside, asserted that the matter had not been properly set forth when I was inquiring about kites.Both old and young men, he continued, frequently endeavoured to fly kites, even in the involved heart of the city.He had tried once or twice himself, but never with encouraging success, chiefly, he was told, because his paper was not good enough.Many people, he added, would not scruple to mislead me with evasive ambiguity on this one subject owing to an ill-balanced conception of what constituted true dignity, but he was unwilling that his countrymen should be thought by mine to be sunk into a deeper barbarism than actually existed.
His warning was not inopportune.Seated next to this person at a later period was a maiden from whose agreeably-poised lips had hitherto proceeded nothing but sincerity and fact.Watching her closely I asked her, as one who only had a languid interest either one way or the other, whether her revered father or her talented and richly-apparelled brothers ever spent their time flying kites about the city.In spite of a most efficientself-control her colour changed at my words, and her features trembled for a moment, but quickly reverting to herself she replied that she thought not; then--as though to subdue my suspicions more completely--that she was sure they did not, as the kites would certainly frighten the horses and the appointed watchmen of the street would not allow it.She confessed, however, with unassumed candour, that the immediate descendants of her sister were gracefully proficient in the art.
From this, great and enlightened one, you will readily perceive how misleading an impression might be carried away by a person scrupulously- intentioned but not continually looking both ways, when placed among a people endowed with the uneasy suspicion of the barbarian and struggling to assert a doubtful refinement.Apart from this, there has to be taken into consideration their involved process of reasoning, and the unexpectedly different standards which they apply to every subject.
