Mr. Davis on the Poetry of the Chinese. 429 



the liberal use of wine. Letaepih's intemperate propensities occasioned, 

 it is said, his banishment from court; but he remained uncured, and at 

 last fell overboard from the boat in which he was travelling, and was 

 drowned. Any one who thougiit it worth his while to know more con- 

 cerning this person, and some of his cotemporaries, might find their lives 

 (though without their poetry) given at some length by Father Amyot, in the 

 fifth volume of the Memoires sur les Chinois, 



A number of esteemed collections, called Tangshee, or ' Poems of the 

 Tang Dynasty,' are regarded, for the most part, as the compositions of Le- 

 taepih, and a few more of the better poets of that day. They contain many 

 favourable specimens, evincing both taste and imagination, and the fol- 

 lowing passage may perhaps be considered as tolerable. A person fishing 

 in a boat, upon a lake, is supposed to have been led, by the ti-ack of peach 

 blossoms floating on the water, into a narrow creek, which he pursued to a 

 distance, until he reached a place inhabited by beings who, from the primitive 

 simplicity of their manners, seemed to have escaped, in that secluded retreat, 

 the persecution of the celebrated tyrant Tsinchehwong, and to have had 

 no communication with the rest of the world since. On his return from 

 this httle Chinese paradise, the adventurous boatman related what he had 

 seen,— or perchance only dreamed ; but on attempting to find the place 

 again, it had vanished. There is a neat allusion to the famous burnin<r of 

 the books by the tyrant's command. ° 



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