and enjoyed considerable vogue. It has indeed
been freely adopted by numerous poets from that early date down to the
present day; but since the 2nd century B.C. it has been displaced from
pre-eminence by the seven-word and five-word measures which are now,
after much refinement, the accepted standards for Chinese poetry. The
origin of the seven-word metre is lost in remote antiquity; the
five-word metre was elaborated under the master-hand of Mei Sheng, who
died 140 B.C. Passing over seven centuries of growth, we reach the
T'ang dynasty, A.D. 618-905, the most brilliant epoch in the history
of Chinese poetry. These three hundred years produced an
extraordinarily large number of great poets, and an output of verse of
almost incredible extent. In 1707 an anthology of the T'ang poets was
published by Imperial order; it ran to nine hundred books or sections,
and contained over forty-eight thousand nine hundred separate poems. A
copy of this work is in the Chinese department of the University
Library at Cambridge.

It was under the T'ang dynasty that a certain finality was reached in
regard to the strict application of the tones to Chinese verse. For
the purposes of poetry, all words in the language were ranged under
one or the other of two tones, the _even_ and the _oblique_, the
former now including the two even tones, of which prior to the 11th
century there was only one, and the latter including the rising,
sinking and entering tones of ordinary speech. The incidence of these
tones, which may be roughly described as sharps and flats, finally
became fixed, just as the incidence of certain feet in Latin metres
came to be governed by fixed rules. Thus, reading downward from right
to left, as in Chinese, a five-word stanza may run:

Sharp Flat Flat Sharp
sharp flat flat sharp
flat sharp flat sharp
o o o o
flat sharp sharp flat
sharp flat sharp flat

A seven-word stanza may run:

Flat Sharp Sharp
flat sharp sharp flat
sharp flat flat sharp
sharp flat flat sharp
o o o o
flat sharp flat flat
flat sharp sharp flat
sharp flat sharp sharp

The above are only two me