y of the
lower classes, and the lukewarm virtue of people who were also lukewarm
in wickedness, and whose present loyalty is dull and cold, like their
late treason.

_Social Life of the Chinese: with some Account of their Religious,
Governmental, Educational, and Business Customs and Opinions, etc._ By
REV. JUSTUS DOOLITTLE, Fourteen Years Member of the Fuhchan Mission of
the American Board. With over One Hundred and Fifty Illustrations. In
Two Volumes. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Mr. Doolittle speaks of a class of degraded individuals in China, "who
are willing to make amusement for others." The severest critic can
hardly assign him to any such class, for there is no reason to suppose
that he would have made his book amusing, if he could possibly have
helped it. But the Chinese are a race of such amazing and inexhaustible
oddities, that the driest description of them, if it be only truthful,
must be entertaining.

What power of prose can withdraw all interest from a people whose
theology declares that whoever throws printed paper on the ground in
anger "has five demerits, and will lose his intelligence," and that he
who tosses it into water "has twenty demerits, and will have sore eyes"?
A people among whom unmarried women who have forsworn meat are called
"vegetable virgins," and married women similarly pledged are known as
"vegetable dames,"--among whom a present of sugar-cane signifies the
approach of an elder sister, and oysters in an earthen vessel are the
charming signal that a younger brother draws near,--a people among whom
the most exciting confectionery is made of rice and molasses,--how can
the Reverend Justus Doolittle deprive such a people of the most piquant
interest?

And when we come to weightier matters, one finds this to be after all
one of those "dry books" for which Margaret Fuller declared her
preference,--a book where the author supplies only a multiplicity of the
most unvarnished facts, and leaves all the imagination to the reader. To
say that he for one instant makes the individuality of a Chinese
conceivable, or his human existence credible, or that he can represent
the whole nation to the fancy as anything but a race of idiotic dolls,
would be saying far too much. No traveller has ever accomplished so much
as that, save that wonderful Roman Catholic, Huc. But setting all this
apart, there has scarcely appeared in English, until now, so exhaustive
and so honest a picture of the exter