" Thus it was that, possibly with this ancient
warning in his mind, he conceived a sudden, violent, and
passionate hatred for didactic works generally, and two books in
particular-the very two, passages from which pedants, philosophers,
ambassadors, and ministers had for centuries hurled at each other's
heads alike in convivial, argumentative, and solemn moments. In
other words, the Odes and the Book, together with Confucius'
"Springs and Autumns," with its censorious hints for rulers, and all
the other local Annals and Histories, were under anathema, But
more detestable even than these were the new philosophical
treatises of a polemical kind, which girded at monarchs through
their subtle choice of words and anecdotes, or which recalled the
good old times of the feudal emperors and their not very obsequious
vassals. His self-laudatory inscriptions upon stone, scattered about
as he travelled from place to place, tell us plainly, in his own royal
words, that this hatred of presumptuous vassal claims was his prime
motive in destroying all the pedants and books he could secure.
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