The scholar and writer
Lin Yutang commented that "'History of Chinese Literature' was a misnomer; it was a series of attempted essays on certain Chinese works, and was not even an outline covering the successive periods.”
Qian Zhongshu noted what he called an "amusing mistake" in Giles' "very readable book." Giles: ::Giles gives a complete version of
Ssu-k'ung Tu's 'philosophical poem, consisting of twenty-four apparently unconnected stanzas'. This poem, according to Professor Giles, 'is admirably adapted to exhibit the forms under which pure Taoism commends itself to the mind of a cultivated scholar.' This is what Professor Giles thinks Ssu-K'ung Tu to have done, but what Ssu-K'ung Tu really does is to convey in imageries of surpassing beauty the impressions made upon a sensitive mind by twenty-four different kinds of poetry—'pure, ornate, grotesque', etc.
Ezra Pound used Giles' translations as the basis for what have been called his English "translations of translations". ==Editions==