Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/222

 210 CHINESE LITERATURE

Then I woke, with no one near me

save the moon, still shining on, And lighting up dead petals

which like you have passed and gone"

There is, however, at least one name of absorbing interest to the foreign student. FENG TAO (881-954) is best known to the Chinese as a versatile politician who served first and last under no less than ten Em- perors of four different Houses, and gave himself a sobriquet which finds its best English equivalent in ''The Vicar of Bray." He presented himself at the Court of the second Emperor of the Liao dynasty and positively asked for a post. He said he had no home, no money, and very little brains ; a statement which appears to have appealed forcibly to the Tartar monarch, who at once appointed him grand tutor to the heir- apparent. By foreigners, on the other hand, he will be chiefly remembered as the inventor of the art of block- printing. It seems probable, indeed, that some crude form of this invention had been already known early in the T'ang dynasty, but until the date of Feng Tao it was certainly not applied to the production of books. Six years after his death the "fire-led" House of Sung was finally established upon the throne, and thence- forward the printing of books from blocks became a familiar handicraft with the Chinese people.

With the advent of this new line, we pass, as the Chinese fairy-stories say, to " another heaven and earth." The various departments of history, classical scholarship, general literature, lexicography, and poetry were again filled with enthusiastic workers, eagerly encouraged by a succession of enlightened rulers. And although there was a falling-off consequent upon the irruption of the

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