fortunes of the Mikados and their court. The nation generally was gradually awaking to a fuller and more vigorous life, and homilies on the instability of human things, the vanity of wealth and power, the detestableness of violence and cruelty, the duty of abstinence from the grosser pleasures, and the beauty of a life of seclusion and pious meditation, were no longer so much to their taste. The moral principles which animated politics and literature were now drawn from the more robust and manly, if more worldly, teachings of the Chinese sages. But of this more remains to be said hereafter.
Towards the end of this period there was a partial reaction in favour of the old Shinto religion. It proved to be only an eddy in the main current of the national thought, and is chiefly important politically as one of the disintegrating influences which led to the breaking up of the Tokugawa régime.
Compared with the writings of the Heian or classical period, the Yedo literature is infinitely more voluminous, and has a far wider range of subjects. It comprises history, biography, poetry, the drama, essays, sermons, a multitude of political and religious treatises, fiction of various kinds and travels, with a huge mass of biblia abiblia, such as dictionaries, grammars, and other philological works, bibliographies, medical works, treatises on botany, law, the art of war, commentaries on the Chinese classics (in themselves a host), expositions of Buddhist doctrine, cyclopædias, antiquarian and metaphysical works, guide-books, and so on.
But while the new literature is much richer and of a more vigorous growth than the old, there is a sad falling off in point of form. With few exceptions it is disfigured by the grossest and most glaring faults. Extravagance,
