Memorial of Im Yu (任濡) giving thanks for the foregoing offices同前謝表

I, your servant so-and-so, report. And so forth. A kindness like heaven and earth is one and the same from beginning to end, and a parent's command is only to go east if told east and west if told west. Reverently bearing up the radiance of your favour, prostrate I grow the more glad and the more afraid.

Prostrate, I consider that your servant is shallow and narrow in his native stuff, and in facing affairs is impractical and coarse. In my youth I was like a shoot on the hill that receives the shade, and early succeeded to my house's hidden merit; in my prime I feared I should be as a jujube by the sea that bears no fruit, and so began to range over the writings of the scholars. Yet I never came to ply the blade with room to spare; I only never reached the point of standing face to face with a wall.

Leaning upon affinity I passed through one glorious seat after another. With the useless person of a vulgar learning I bear a situation in which the multitude will readily doubt me, and each time I received office I skipped the grades. What is hard to stop is the words of the multitude: they will by no means call it a public choice. Looking back, what I have consumed in salary comes to a thousand bushels in three years, while if I reckon my merit and ability for myself there is not one part in ten thousand. By this alone it is already full and overflowing, and I am always in fear of being overturned.

How then should I have dared to think that, by the ample words of a phoenix-figured rescript, you would also choose me for the secret seat of the Privy Council? Again you have had me hold jointly the bureau charged with selecting officials, and grade the quality of men. Having no virtue to bear it, though men point at me and say it is not right, yet to disobey the command would be to defy you, and your servant too can hardly decline it firmly. While I receive, as in a bath, the soaking of your rich rain, I shiver and tremble as though treading thin ice. My gratitude is deep and my tears fall; the kindness is heavy and the person light.

This is, in sum, because Your Imperial Majesty gathers in timber of every kind and cuts out and completes the great teaching; because, taking as your model the government of the sovereign of Han, what could even Zhou add to it; and because, following the manner in which the king of Yan honoured worthy men, you have begun with Gwak Oe (郭隗). Therefore you have taken in one clumsy and thin, and shown that you gather men selectively yet with all alike.

How should your servant dare not shake off his darkness and think toward the light, and exhaust his folly and bring forth wisdom? Truly, so far as ear and eye can reach, I shall strive diligently from early dawn until night, and bear the yoke and shoulder the shaft, and not stop until I have spent my small strength. Though my body were crushed and my bones ground to powder, how should it be enough to repay your great kindness? Your servant cannot contain, and so forth.