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the eccentricity of some of his truant adventures to the very popularity he enjoyed. Where beautiful flowers expand their blossoms even the rugged mountaineer loves to rest under their shade, so wherever he showed himself people sought his notice!’

(D) ‘It was one evening in April of the following year that Genji happened to be going to the villa of “the falling flowers,” and passed by the mansion of the Princess. There was in the garden a large pine-tree, from whose branches the beautiful clusters of a wistaria hung in rich profusion. A sigh of the evening breeze shook them as they hung in the silver moonlight, and scattered their rich fragrance towards the wayfarer. There was also a weeping-willow close by, whose pendent tresses of new verdure touched the half-broken walls of earth underneath.’

The plot of the ‘Genji Monogatari,’ it is regrettable to say, displays a great laxity of morals, but the sentiment is fine, as is universally the case in similar works of the period. ‘Of coarseness and pruriency, moreover,’ says Mr. Aston, ‘there is none in the “Genji,” nor, indeed, in the literature of this period generally. The language is almost invariably decent, and even refined, and we hardly ever meet with a phrase calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of a young person.’ It seems, moreover, there was a prevailing custom at the time of man and wife living separately, so that all stories of ancient days about a man and a woman relating to their love affairs did not necessarily mean anything clandestine. Lady Aoi, daughter of the grandest officer of the State, and lawful wife in every respect of Genji, a Prince of royal blood, is represented in the ‘Genji Monogatari’ as living at her father’s, with a suite of separate rooms. When we take this into consideration, the denunciation of immorality applied to that romance may, to some extent, be relaxed.

Toward the end of the twelfth century, as I have already described, the ruling power of the Imperial Court was transferred to the military government of the Shogun. This was the Kamakura period, which was followed by those of Ashikaga and Oda-Toyotomi. At these periods, together with that of Tokugawa, the country was in the state of military domination, the Court and its nobles having been reduced to a miserable condition. Wars were also incessant, though often at long intervals. Hence we can well imagine that literary culture showed a great decadence. Books were written mostly in the form of history. They were history, because their facts were real historical ones, but they were also a sort of romance because their diction and expansion of description were more