58 REV. PROFESSOR JAMES LEGGH, M.A., ON 
would leave a blank in his text rather than enter anything of 
which he was not sufficiently assured.* We are furnished 
by Tso Ch’if-ming with an instance in point of a somewhat 
different character, which occurred in B.c. 548, when Con- 
fucius was in his 4th year. In that year the Marquis of the 
State of Ch’i was killed in the mansion of Ts’fi Chi, one of 
his principal ministers with whose wife he had been carrying 
on a shameful intrigue. The death was not inflicted by the 
minister’s own hand, but it had his knowledge and approval. 
We hardly blame him for the deed; but the hereditary 
historiographer of the State, as he was bound to do, entered 
the notice of it in his tablets in the words, ‘ T's’fi Chi mur- 
dered his ruler ;’f and the minister, enraged, caused him to be 
put to death, and the record destroyed. First, one brother 
and then another, who had succeeded to the office, repeated 
the offence and met with the same fate; a third brother took 
the fatal pencil and followed their example; but by this time 
sucha general feeling of indignation had been excited by the 
events that the minister did not dare to deal with him as he 
had done with the others. He was obliged to let the man 
and the notice alone. 
There were then historiographers in the time of Chau, 
and from an intimation in the 10th Book of that dynasty in 
the Shfii Ching, we learn that similar officers had existed 
under the previous dynasty of Yin or Shang, the commence- 
ment of which dates from B.c. 1766. Beyond the Shang 
dynasty I have not been able to trace them. Mention is 
made indeed in the Sha of a writing made in B.C. 1321, and 
of another made earlier, about B.c. 1753. “Statutes of 
Government” are also referred to in the 4th Book of the 
Dynasty of Hsia, assigned to the 22nd century B.c., from 
which expression we must conclude that there existed even 
then a written code of laws in the country; and if there 
were written laws, there must have been further written 
records of every kind. We may safely believe that when 
Ch’ien undertook the composition of his work, the materials 
necessary for it were ready to his hand. 
Some account of Sze-ma Cl’ien. 
4. Let me interject here some account of the man himself, 
brief indeed, but longer than I gave at the outset. He ap- 
pended to his records a short autobiography which supplies 
* Analects xv, 25. 
+ See the Tso Ch’wan, under the 25th year of Duke Hsiang. 
