teachings of the philosophers of China, and expounded and applied by their Japanese followers, gained in precision and detail. But what had originally been a wholesome and vivifying influence became a burden to the nation. It fell most heavily on the Samurai, all whose actions were governed by strict rules and punctilious etiquette, in a way which was fatal to any reasonable share of personal freedom. In short, the great fault of the later Shōgunate was over-regulation in almost every department of life. I was one day walking with the late Count Terashima, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, in one of those beautiful creations of the landscape gardener's art which abound in Tokio. He pointed to a grove of fir-trees standing by an artificial lake, which had been trimmed and trained by generations of gardeners into quaint and not unpleasing but stunted shapes. "There," he said, "is an emblem of the Japanese nation under the Bakufu [Shōgunate]. That is what Chinese learning did for us."
There is much in this type of humanity which it is hard for us Europeans to understand and appreciate. The Japanese of the ancient classical period appeal more strongly to our sympathies. Even Herodotus and Plato, far removed as they are from us in point of time, are immeasurably nearer to modern Englishmen in all their ideas, sentiments, and moral standards, than the Japanese of fifty years ago.
Fujiwara Seikwa was the forerunner of a long series of Kangakusha. His pupils became in their turn teachers, and handed on the torch of learning, which now began to burn brightly. It is difficult to give an idea of the rage for the acquisition of knowledge which possessed the Japanese people during the seventeenth century. It
