anything to justify Motoöri's opinion. Its style, though occasionally more or less ornate, is not really more poetical than that of many books for which no such pretension is advanced. To this, however, an exception must be noticed. In a very few passages, forming altogether an utterly insignificant part of the book, there is something of that alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables which in Japan constitutes metre, and the diction and thought bear traces of an attempt to treat the subject in a poetical manner. The following is a specimen:—
A local official named Morotsune, having had a dispute with the monks of a certain temple, burnt it. The latter assembled the monks of the parent monastery, to the number of over two thousand men, and approached his official residence:—
"And now the sun went down.
Resolved to engage battle on the morrow,
That night they drew near and contained themselves.
The breath of the dew-laden wind of autumn
Fluttered the left sleeves of their armour.
The lightning which illumined the clouds above
Made the stars of their helmets to blaze.
Morotsune, feeling that resistance was in vain,
Fled up by flight to Kiōto.
The next day they advanced at the hour of the Hare [sunrise]
And abruptly raised the battle-cry;
But within the castle not a sound was heard.
A man was sent to examine,
But reported that they had all decamped.
Even in this short passage the regularity of metre and the poetical diction are not well sustained.
It would not be necessary to dwell on this feature of the Heike Monogatari but for the circumstance that we have here the beginning of a kind of composition which
