so far as
allegiance was concerned. For some time, the object of each vassal
ruler had been the aggrandizement of his own state, with a view either
to independence or to the hegemony, and the result was a state of
almost constant warfare. Accordingly, the entries in the _Ch'un Ch'iu_
refer largely to covenants entered into between contracting rulers,
official visits from one to another of these rulers, their births and
deaths, marriages, invasions of territory, battles, religious
ceremonies, &c., interspersed with notices of striking natural
phenomena such as eclipses, comets and earthquakes, and of important
national calamities, such as floods, drought and famine. For instance,
Duke Wen became ruler of Lu in 625 B.C., and under his 14th year, 612
B.C., we find twelve entries, of which the following are specimens:--

2. In spring, in the first month, the men of the Chu State invaded our
southern border.

3. In summer, on the I-hai day of the fifth month, P'an, Marquis of
the Ch'i State, died.

5. In autumn, in the seventh month, there was a comet, which entered
Pei-ton ([Greek: abgd] in Ursa Major).

9. In the ninth month, a son of the Duke of Ch'i murdered his ruler.

Entry 5 affords the earliest trustworthy instance of a comet in China.
A still earlier comet is recorded in what is known as The Bamboo
Annals, but the genuineness of that work is disputed.

It will be readily admitted that the _Ch'un Ch'iu_, written throughout
in the same style as the quotations given, would scarcely enable one
to reconstruct in any detail the age it professes to record. Happily
we are in possession of the _Tso Chuan_, a so-called commentary,
presumably by some one named Tso, in which the bald entries in the
work of Confucius are separately enlarged upon to such an extent and
with such dramatic brilliancy that our commentary reads more like a
prose epic than "a treatise consisting of a systematic series of
comments or annotations on the text of a literary work." Under its
guidance we can follow the intrigues, the alliances, the treacheries,
the ruptures of the jealous states which constituted feudal China; in
its picture pages we can see, as it were with our own eyes,
assassinations, battles, heroic deeds, flights, pursuits and the
sufferings of the vanquished from the retribution exacted by the
victors. Numerous wise and witty sayings are scattered througho