"It must have been a catacornered sight, whatever it was, if the Emperor's eyes slanted like yours." "No personalities, please, Doctor," said Sir Walter Raleigh, the chairman, rapping the table vigorously with the shade of a handsome gavel that had once adorned the Roman Senate-chamber.
"He's only a Chinaman!" muttered Johnson.
"What was the sight that greeted your eyes, Confucius ?" asked Cassius.
"Omar Khayyam stretched over five of the most comfortable chairs in the library," returned Confucius; "and when I ventured to remonstrate with him he lost his temper, and said I'd spoiled the whole second volume of the Rubaiyat.

I told him he ought to do his rubaiyatting at home, and he made a scene, to avoid which I hastened with my guest over to the billiard-room; and there, stretched at full length on the pool-table, was Robert Burns trying to write a sonnet on the cloth with chalk in less time than Villon could turn out another, with two lines start, on the billiard-table with the same writing materials.

Now I ask you, gentlemen, if these things are to be tolerated?
Are they not rather to be reprehended, whether I am a Chinaman or not ?" "What would you have us do, then ?" asked Sir Walter Raleigh, a little nettled.

"Exclude poets altogether?
I was one, remember." "Oh, but not much of one, Sir Walter," put in Doctor Johnson, deprecatingly.
"No," said Confucius.

"I don't want them excluded, but they should be controlled.