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292
THE SHIH KING.
which it was the business of the Grand Music-Master to teach the musicians of the court. It may be accepted then, that the duke of Kâu, in legislating for his dynasty, enacted that the poems produced in the different feudal states should be collected on occasion of the royal progresses, and lodged thereafter among the archives of the bureau of music at the royal court. The same thing, we may presume à fortiori, would be done, at certain other stated times, with those produced within the royal domain itself.
. But the feudal states were modelled after the pattern of the royal state. They also had their music-masters, their The music
ir musicians, and their historiographers. The master of the kings in their progresses did not visit each king would get the.des oferch particular state, so that the Grand Musicstate from its Master could have the opportunity to collect music-master.
master. the odes in it for himself. They met, at wellknown points, the marquises, earls, barons, &c., of the different quarters of the kingdom ; there gave audience to them ; adjudicated on their merits, and issued to them their orders. We are obliged to suppose that the princes were attended to the places of rendezvous by their musicmasters, carrying with them the poetical compositions gathered in their several regions, to present them to their superior of the royal court. We can understand how, by mcans of the above arrangement, the poems of the whole kingdom were accumulated and arranged among the archives of the capital. Was there any provision for dis
How the col. seminating thence the poems of one state lected poems among all the others? There is sufficient were disseminated through evidence that such dissemination was effected
out the states. in some way. Throughout the Narratives of the States, and the details of 30 Khid-ming on the history of the Spring and Autumn, the officers of the states generally are presented to us as familiar not only with the odes of their particular states, but with those of other states as well. They appear equally well acquainted with all the Parts and Books of our present Shih; and we saw how the whole of it was sung over to Ki Ka of Wu, when he visited the court of LQ in the boyhood of Confucius. There was,
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