Two worthy tidbits from the execrably authored The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell:

Han Yu, whose friends washed their hands in rose water before opening the manuscript of his poems... rid his province of a large and pestiferous crocodile by addressing to it a written censure, committed to the river along with a pig and a goat, a censure still regarded as a model of Chinese prose composition

Puts one in mind of the incident in Eyrbyggja Saga when a malignant ghost is exorcised by bringing a formal Icelandic legal action against it.

Secondly, wise words from the Latin poet Ausonius:

...for it is outrageous that a strictly abstemious reader should sit in judgement on a poet rather drunk.