“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.  You don’t let a shoemaker who has become a member of this club turn the library sofas into benches and go pegging away at boot-making, so why should you let the poets turn the place into a verse factory?  That’s what I’d like to know.”

“I don’t know but what your point is well taken,” said Blackstone, “though I can’t say I think your parallels are very parallel.  A shoemaker, my dear Confucius, is somewhat different from a poet.”

“Certainly,” said Doctor Johnson.  “Very different—­in fact, different enough to make a conundrum of the question—­what is the difference between a shoemaker and a poet?  One makes the shoes and the other shakes the muse—­all the difference in the world.  Still, I don’t see how we can exclude the poets.  It is the very democracy of this club that gives it life.  We take in everybody—­peer, poet, or what not.  To say that this man shall not enter because he is this or that or the other thing would result in our ultimately becoming a class organization, which, as Confucius himself says, we are not and must not be.  If we put out the poet to please the sage, we’ll soon have to put out the sage to please the fool, and so on.  We’ll keep it up, once the precedent is established, until finally it will become a class club entirely—­a Plumbers’ Club, for instance—­and how absurd that would be in Hades!  No, gentlemen, it can’t be done.  The poets must and shall be preserved.”

“What’s the objection to class clubs, anyhow?” asked Cassius.  “I don’t object to them.  If we could have had political organizations in my day I might not have had to fall on my sword to get out of keeping an engagement I had no fancy for.  Class clubs have their uses.”