Memorial thanking for being given the post of examiner for the Supervisory Examination同前謝表
云云。掄材任重。授柄人難。有命諄諄。自天假手。省窮懍懍。無地措顔。伏念臣賦性迂疏。爲人遲澁。早年嗜學。對螢案以忘疲。晚歲牽名。掩蠹篇而懶講。及典演綸之職。更尋束閣之文。其服膺經術之痛勤。若求擧場屋之平昔。尙緣衰耄。多至遺忘。豈圖稽古濬哲之心。猶記讀書勤苦之力。特加寵訓。俾闢文闈。顧無皮裏之陽秋。曷辨眼前之朱紫。讓莫廻於上聽。始則心兢。情已激於聖知。忽焉涕出。被人所羨。知身益榮。此蓋伏遇聖上陛下欲網羅天下之衆才。先奬飾邇聯之末士。旣厚以豢養之澤。又畀之品藻之權。仰惟此恩。何以爲報。考藝知人則雖臣之所短。得賢助國者卽今也其時。但當努力竭精。礪朽磨鈍。積塵成岳。庶培千仞之高。披沙揀金。儻得雙南之寶。云云。
And so forth. The choosing of timber is a weighty charge, and the giving of authority to a man is hard. The command was earnest, and from heaven you lent me your hand. Looking at my own meagreness, I am afraid and tremble, and have no ground on which to set my face.
Prostrate I consider that your servant is by nature loose and sparse, and slow and awkward in his person. In youth I delighted in learning, and facing a desk lit by fireflies forgot my weariness; but in later years I was drawn away by a name, and closed the worm-eaten books and grew slack in expounding them. Only on taking the office of composing rescripts did I again seek out the writings I had bundled up and laid aside. If what I once held to my breast of the classics and the disciplines, and laboured diligently at, were now required of me as it was in the examination halls of old, still there is much I have forgotten through age and decline.
How should I have reckoned that with a mind deep and enlightened in examining antiquity you would still remember the strength I once spent in labouring over books, and would add especially an instruction of grace and have me open the gate of composition? Looking back, within my skin there is no judgment such as the Spring and Autumn Annals hold — how should I sift the true from the false before my eyes?
My declining could not turn the hearing above, and at first my heart trembled; but my feeling was already roused by Your Sage Majesty's recognition of me, and suddenly tears came. Receiving the envy of others, I know that my person is the more in glory.
This is, in the main, that prostrate I have met with Your Sage Majesty's wish to gather in as with a net all the talents under heaven: first you encouraged and adorned a scholar at the last place of the near ranks, and having already made thick your benefaction of rearing and feeding, you gave him besides the authority to appraise. Looking up and thinking on this favour, with what shall I repay it?
To look into talent and know a man is indeed what your servant lacks, yet to obtain worthy men and aid the state — now is the very time for it. Only I ought to strive and spend my whole spirit, whetting what is rotten and grinding what is blunt; heaping up dust to make a mountain, I hope to raise a height of a thousand fathoms, and parting the sand to pick out gold, I would obtain perhaps a treasure like the two lumps of southern gold (南金). And so forth.
Interlinear notes 1
中謝。
Here the words of thanks (中謝) are inserted.