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period left that is worthy of notice save its poetry. We have the Manyōshiu (Million Leaves), a book which is a collection of poems dating from some time previous to the Nara period down to the early parts of the Heian period. The collection seems to have begun at the end of the Nara period, but to have been finished by a great poet who lived in the Heian period, and hence the incorporation of some poems of the latter period.
From this book we can fairly judge that the art of poetry has never again attained to that pitch by any subsequent generation throughout the whole of our history. The scale of our poetry is small on the whole, although that of the Nara period contains a good deal worth reading.
Speaking of the poetry of this period, Mr. Aston writes thus:
‘While the eighth century has left us little or no prose literature of importance, it was emphatically the golden age of poetry. Japan had now outgrown the artless effusions described in a preceding chapter, and during this period produced a body of verse of an excellence which has never since been surpassed. The reader who expects to find this poetry of a nation just emerging from the barbaric stage of culture characterized by rude, untutored vigour will be surprised to learn that, on the contrary, it is distinguished by polish rather than power. It is delicate in sentiment and refined in language, and displays exquisite skill of phrase, with a careful adherence to certain canons of composition of its own.’
This, I think, will be a sufficient survey of the subject.
We come next to the Heian period. Here we see that literary culture was greatly developed. All kinds of books were written—histories, books of law and ceremony, travels, diaries, memoirs, romances, narratives, and anecdotes. The study of Chinese was much in vogue at the time, and many of these books are written in Chinese. Our native literature also sprang up, and made wonderful progress, and it was then that our native classical books came into existence. They were written entirely in the pure phonetical alphabet, almost entirely consisting of vernacular words, terms of Chinese derivation being used very rarely, except, perhaps, the names of offices or those of the concrete objects having Chinese origin. True it is that they have not yet devised a mode of dividing words from words, so that readers may see at once every word separate; but this was also the case with the ancient Greeks and many others. Neither did they know how to make use of the signs such as the full-stop, the comma, and the note of exclamation, etc., so as to make reading easy, and at the same time to give the reader some kind of sense and idea beyond the words themselves. Had the native literature of the time been kept up, and had there been