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BK. XXXI. BRIEF NOTICES OF THE DIFFERENT BOOKS. 159
sword-fight, and kept about him a crowd of vulgar bravoes such as the story describes. We may be assured that our author never wore the bravo's dress or girt on him the bravo's sword. The whole is a metaphorical representation of the way in which a besotted ruler might be brought to a feeling of his degradation, and recalled to a sense of his duty and the way in which he might fulfil it. The narrative is full of interest and force. I do not feel any great difficulty in accepting it as the genuine composition of Kwang-zze. Who but himself could have composed it? Was it a goodhumoured caricature of him by an able Confucian writer to repay him for the ridicule he was fond of casting on the
sage?
Book XXXI. YÜ-FO.
'The Old Fisherman'is the fourth of the Books in the collection of the writings of Kwang-zze to which, since the time of Sû Shih, the epithet of spurious' has been attached by many. My own opinion, however, has been already intimated that the suspicions of the genuineness of those Books have been entertained on insufficient grounds; and so far as 'the Old Fisherman'is concerned, I am glad that it has come down to us, spurious or genuine. There may be a certain coarseness in the Robber Kih,' which makes us despise Confucius or laugh at him; but the satire in this Book is delicate, and we do not like the sage the less when he walks up the bank from the stream where he has been lectured by the fisherman. The pictures of him and his disciples in the forest, reading and singing on the Apricot Terrace, and of the old man slowly impelling his skiff to the land and then as quietly impelling it away till it is lost among the reeds, are delicious; there is nothing finer of its kind in the volume. What hand but that of Kwang-gze, so light in its touch and yet so strong, both incisive and decisive, could have delineated them?
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