e walls of the palace; for dangerous thoughts might have arisen had
it been known that the State was drifting rudderless, a prey to the
wild waves of sedition and lawless outbreak. The accession of a child
to reign under the style of Kuang Hsu was proclaimed before it was
publicly made known that his predecessor had passed away.

[*] Either one or all of the characters composing an emperor's name
are altered by the addition or omission of certain component
parts; as if, for instance, we were to write an Alb_a_rt chain
merely because Alb_e_rt is the name of the heir-apparent.
Similarly, a child will never utter or write its father's name;
and the names of Confucius and Mencius are forbidden to all alike.

Of the personal history of the ill-fated boy who has thus been
prematurely cut off just as he was entering upon manhood and the
actual government of four hundred million souls, we know next to
nothing. His accession as an infant to the dignities of a sensual,
dissipated father, attracted but little attention either in China or
elsewhere; and from that date up to the year 1872, all we heard about
His Majesty was, that he was making good progress in Manchu, or had
hit the target three times out of ten shots at a distance of about
twenty-five yards. He was taught to ride on horseback, though up to
the day of his death he never took part in any great hunting
expeditions, such as were frequently indulged in by earlier emperors
of the present dynasty. He learnt to read and write Chinese, though
what progress he had made in the study of the Classics was of course
only known to his teachers. Painting may or may not have been an
Imperial hobby; but it is quite certain that the drama received more
perhaps than its full share of patronage. The ladies and eunuchs of
the palace are notoriously fond of whiling away much of their
monotonous existence in watching the grave antics of professional
tragedians and laughing at the broad jokes of the low-comedy man, with
his comic voice and funnily-painted face. Listening to the tunes
prescribed by the Book of Ceremonies, and dining in solemn solitary
grandeur off the eight[*] precious kinds of food set apart for the
sovereign, his late Majesty passed his boyhood, until in 1872 he
married the fair A-lu-te, and practically ascended the dragon throne
of his ancestors. Up to that time the Empresses-Dowager, hidden behind
a bamboo screen, had transacted business with the