"Proceeding to the capital he purchased a very expensive guitar which had been for a long time on sale, and then let it be known that on the following day he would perform upon it in public. This attracted a large crowd; but when Ch'ēn arrived he informed his auditors that he had something in his pocket worth much more than the guitar. Thereupon he dashed the instrument into a thousand pieces, and forthwith began handing round copies of his own writings." Like every one else who sees this fascinating volume, Frank was wild for more, and I read him excerpts from the lives of other poets--not better than Dr. Samuel Johnson's, but more concise and freakish. Such as Wang Po, a poet of the seventh century A.D., who began as a statesman, but on being dismissed from office for satirising the cock-fighting propensities of the Imperial princes, filled up his leisure by composing verses. "He never meditated upon these beforehand, but after having prepared a quantity of ink ready for use, he would drink himself tipsy and lie down with his face covered up. On waking, he would seize his pen and write off verses, not a word of which needed to be changed; whence he acquired the sobriquet of Belly-draft." Liu Ling, another poet, and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grave, was also a hard drinker and a man of infinite humour. It was he who declared that "'to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed in a river.' He wished to be always accompanied by a servant with wine, and followed by another with a spade, so that he might be buried where he fell. On one occasion, yielding to the entreaties of his wife, he promised to 'swear off,' and bade her prepare the usual sacrifices of wine and meat. When all was ready, he prayed, saying, 'O God, who didst give to Liu Ling a reputation through wine, he being able to consume a gallon at a sitting and requiring a quart to sober him again, listen not to the words of his wife, for she speaketh not truth.' Thereupon he drank up the sacrificial wine, and was soon as drunk as ever." A tenderer genius was Chēng Ku, of the ninth century A.D., who "said that no one should sing his _Song of the Partridge_ in the presence of Southerners, as it made them think sadly of their far-off homes." Li Po, founder of the coterie known as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup (having got his hand in as a club-maker by forming, some years earlier, the hard-drinking company known as the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Brook), should certainly be better known in a country where the sanction of an illustrious wine-bibber--a Burns or an Omar--is so necessary to literary convivialists. The mother of Li Po, who roystered and revelled in the eighth century A.D., dreamed just before his birth of the planet Venus. The boy was therefore a poet at ten years of age, and a great swordsman very soon after.