Edict making Choe Jeonghwa Grand Master of the Silver and Blue Imperial Favor, Commissioner of the Privy Council and Minister of Taxation, and letting him retire from office崔正華爲銀靑光祿大夫樞密使戶部尙書致仕敎書官誥各一道 敎書
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) 東國李相國集 · Yi Gyubo · Compiled 1241 (Goryeo, 28th year of King Gojong); revised and enlarged 1251 · 1 passages · 149 Chinese characters · reading time 1.3 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 34 The collected writings of Yi Gyubo of Goryeo, gathered and cut in woodblock by his son Yi Ham in 1241 and revised and enlarged by his grandson Yi Ikbae in 1251. It holds poems and rhapsodies, memorials and reports sent up to the king, records written for temples and pagodas, stele and tomb inscriptions, letters and prefaces, and the state letters that passed to and from the Mongols during the invasions. The Lay of King Dongmyeong, which sings the founder of Goguryeo, stands in volume 3 of the first collection, and the daily life of a man who called himself the White Cloud Layman — with his wine, his zither and his verse — fills the later collection. The book closes with the last poem he wrote as his eyes failed and he laid down the brush, and with the dirge and tomb inscription others made for him after his death.
On the whole, that a great officer, having reached the age when he may follow his own heart, should cite the classics and beg to withdraw is the ordinary course of propriety. Yet if his talent is such as to take charge of the state's framework and his wisdom such as to aid the warp of government, so that he becomes the right and left hand of my single self, then by the heart of a sovereign who covets worthy men it is truly not against reason to hold him fast and keep him. One such as you, my lord, is just this.
But since you decline with the words that you are old in years and cannot take charge of affairs, your will is firm and cannot be wrested from you. If even so I were to hold you back by force, this too would be a thing that reason will not allow. Moreover, when a subject advances and withdraws by propriety, it is right that the sovereign treat him by propriety. And the way to make that propriety generous is only the one small matter of raising his rank and heightening his office. Could I take the seal in my hand and finger it and begrudge it? In conferring it thus, how should this be my own true wish? And so forth.