THE SHE KING; OR, THE BOOK OF ANCIENT POETRY

4 THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE SHE.
Proofs of the istence of the She, or Book of Poetry, before
Bod^oFpoetr6 Confucius, digested under four divisions, and
before the time much in the same order as at present, there
may be advanced the following proofs:
First, in the " Official Book of Chow," we are told that
it belonged to the .grand-master " to teach the six classes
of poems, the Fung, with their descriptive, metaphorical,
and allusive pieces, the Ya, and the Sung." Mr Wylie
-says that the question of the genuineness of the Official
Book may be considered as set at rest since the inquiry
into it by Choo He, and that it is to be accepted as a work
of the duke of Chow, or some other sage of the Chow
dynasty.1 Without committing myself to any opinion on
this point, as I find the passage just quoted in the Preface
to the She (of which I shall treat in the next chapter), I
cannot but accept it as having been current before Con
fucius ; and thus we have a distinct reference to a collec
tion of poems, earlier than his time, with the same
division into Parts, and the same classification of the
pieces in those Parts.
Second, in Part II. of the She, Book vi., Ode IX., an
ode assigned to the time of king Yew, B.C. 780 770, we
have the words,
" They sing the Ya and the Nan,
Dancing to their flutes without error."
So early then as the 8th century before our era, there was
a collection of poems, of which some bore the name of
the Nan, which there is nothing to forbid our supposing
to have been the Chow-nan and the Shaou-uan, forming
the first two Books of the first Part of the present
classic, often spoken of together as the Nan; and of
which others bore the name of the Ya, being probably
the earlier pieces which now compose a large portion of
the second and third Parts.
Third, in the narratives of Tso K'ew-ming, under the
29th year of duke Seang, B.C. 543, when Confucius was
only 8 or 9 years old, we have an account of a visit to the
court of Loo by an envoy from Woo, an eminent states
man of the time, and of great learning. We are told
1 Notes on Chinese Literature, p. 4.
THE SHE BEFORE CONFUCIUS. 5
that as he wished to hear the music of Chow, which he
could do better in Loo than in any other State, they sang
to him the odes of the Chow-nan and the Shaou-nan; those
of P'ei, Yung, and Wei; of the Eoyal domain; of Ch'ing ;
of Ts