g things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to
solve all the problems,--to take you out of the dust and clatter
of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all
problems are solved, or non-existent. Chu Hia is all a fuss and
turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old
Philosopher--as he has come to be called--has anchorage right
outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the
peaks of heaven. A kind of school forms itself around him; his
wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men
of the capital from commonplace courses. Though he has been
accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing;
living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,--as things
at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and
wrappings for its cocoon;--whereas he would have had the whole
cocoon stripped away, and the butterfly beautifully airing its
wings. Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers
among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us. They have
to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and
much else, are included in Chinese in the one word _Tao._

"The main purpose of his studies" says Ssema Tsien (the 'Father
of Chinese History'), "was to keep himself concealed and
unknown." In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future
ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign
of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure
of his identity. He tells us all we know, or think we know,
about Laotse:--that he was born in a village in southern Honan;
kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517;
and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the _Tao
Teh King_ with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier;--and then
goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded
as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a
contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on
the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand
Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and
a quarter later. To me this is chiefly interesting as a
suggestion that the 'School of Tao' was a thing existent and
well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing
about it.

It may we'll have been. Taoists ascribe the foundation of their
religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B. C.;
but there never was ti