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duction is slightly executed on one side of the bottle; the stalk and leaves have the appearance of a drawing in Indian ink, being of a pale watery black, and the flower is

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of light red. The style of this slight sketch is precisely Chinese. On the reverse side are five characters-ming, yue, soong, choong, chaou, being a line of five words taken from a poem, and having this meaning: "the bright moon shines amidst the firs." The interior of the bottle contained a small quantity of a black and nearly impalpable powder, which had a carbonized appearance, stated by Sir G. Wilkinson to be the collyrium with which the Egyptian women stained their eyelids. This strange relic, had it been met with in China, would have excited little notice, being so like other bottles of the same shape and size actually in use; but its ascertained discovery in an Egyptian tomb is a matter for speculation.

The statement of Signor Rosellini, that he himself

opened the tomb in which he found one of the bottles, is very circumstantial; but the tomb may have been opened before. The characters on the bottles are not only of a modern shape, but the scraps of poetry have been recognized by the Chinese themselves as the productions of a person who lived at a comparatively late period.

The lackered or varnished ware of the Chinese, though by their own admission inferior to that of Japan, is occasionally, in the hands of the best workmen, a beautiful manufacture. It varies, however, from the polished jetty surface of the magnificent folding-screens, sometimes brought home to this country, down to the articles of daily use made for the Chinese themselves, in the shape of tubs, trays, and wash-hand basins, with the ornamental parts of their buildings. These coarser varieties are derived from the nuts or seeds of the Dryandra cordata, while the finer kind is obtained from the gum of a species of Rhus. The chief expense of the manufacture arises from the care with which the consistence of the varnish must be regulated in laying it on, and the number of repetitions required in the finer kinds of ware, of which each successive coat must be allowed a considerable time to dry before it is again touched. When first introduced to Europe, this manufacture was highly appreciated, and the export from Canton considerable; but the improvements in our own productions have reduced the quantity. now in demand to something very small.

The native ingenuity of the Chinese, to which themselves and the rest of the world have apparently been indebted for so many important and useful inventions, has been recorded by the late Sir George Staunton, on occasions when their efforts were required by the embassy. "Two of them (says he) took down the two magnificent glass lustres sent as presents to the emperor, in order to

place them in a more advantageous position. They separated them piece by piece, and put them again together in a short time without difficulty or mistake, the whole consisting of many thousand minute pieces, though they had never seen anything of the kind before. Another Chinese cut a narrow slip from the edge of a curved plate of glass, in order to supply the place of one belonging to the dome of the Planetarium, which had been broken in the carriage. The English mechanics belonging to the embassy had in vain attempted to cut the glass according to this curved line, with the assistance of a diamond. The native workman did not show his method; but it was said that he succeeded by first drawing the point of a heated iron across the surface to be divided.” *

As relates to the fine arts, or those which minister rather to the pleasures than to the wants of mankind, it becomes necessary to make some allowances for the peculiarities of national taste, which has generally been admitted to be the most conventional and capricious thing in the world, being determined by the infinite varieties of national character, models, and associations. The arts of drawing and painting do not rank so high among the Chinese as among ourselves in Europe, and, having therefore met with less encouragement, they may be expected to have made less progress. In works that do not require a scientific adherence to the rules of perspective they are sometimes very successful. They paint insects, birds, fruits, and flowers, very beautifully, and nothing can exceed the splendour and variety of their colours. Native artists have often been employed at Canton and Macao, by English naturalists, in delineating various specimens in botany and zoology; and under proper direction they

* Embassy, vol. ii. p. 288.

have been found capable of giving a correct and scientific representation of the various objects, as well as a brilliant and well-coloured drawing. One thing in our European art they do not fully enter into, which is shading; and they positively object to the introduction of shadows in painting. Mr. Barrow states, "When several portraits by the best European artists, intended as presents for the emperor, were exposed to view, the mandarins, observing the variety of tints occasioned by the light and shade, asked whether the originals had the right and left sides of the figure of different colours? They considered the shadow of the nose as a great imperfection in the figure, and some supposed it to have been placed there by accident."

Though the Chinese certainly do not practise the art of perspective in its correctness, or according to any regular rules, it would be a mistake to suppose that it is always entirely neglected. Their artists, at Canton at least, have taken hints from European performances in this respect, and their drawings by the eye are often tolerably correct as to perspective, though light and shade are still neglected. The woodcuts in Chinese books are generally executed almost entirely in outline, which is occasionally very spirited as well as faithful. The drawings which they chiefly value among themselves are in water-colours and Indian ink, sketched in a very slight manner upon either fine paper or silk. A favourite subject with them is the bamboo, which is represented in all the different stages of its growth, from the tender shoot, just appearing above the earth (when they use it for food, as we do asparagus), up to the period of its producing its grass-like flowers and seeds.

In connexion with drawing and the imitative arts, we may observe that the Chinese style of ornamental garden

ing, and of laying out pleasure-grounds, has been very much overdrawn by Sir William Chambers, in an essay on that subject, which may be considered quite as a work of imagination in itself. Mr. Barrow, however, who resided for a considerable time at Yuen-ming-yuen, "the garden of perpetual brightness," which is an extensive pleasure-ground of the emperor, lying north-west of Peking, and greatly exceeding Richmond Park in extent, has given a favourable account of their taste in this department of the arts. "The grand and agreeable parts of nature (he observes) were separated, connected, or arranged in so judicious a manner as to compose one whole, in which there was no inconsistency or unmeaning jumble of objects, but such an order and proportion as generally prevail in scenes entirely natural. No round or oval, square or oblong lawns, with the grass shorn off close to the roots, were to be found anywhere in those grounds. The Chinese are particularly expert in magnifying the real dimensions of a piece of land, by a proper disposition of the objects intended to embellish its surface. For this purpose tall and luxuriant trees of the deepest green were planted in the foreground, from whence the view was to be taken; whilst those in the distance gradually diminished in size and depth of colouring; and in general the ground was terminated by broken and irregular clumps of trees, whose foliage was varied, as well by the different species of trees in the group, as by the different times of the year in which they were in vigour; and oftentimes the vegetation was apparently old and stunted, making with difficulty its way through the clefts of rocks, either originally found, or designedly collected upon the spot.

"The effect of intricacy and concealment seemed also to be well understood by the Chinese. At Yuen-ming

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