and herbs in our gardens and love them. In our leisure moments we should pay some attention to looking for things easy to get, just as they may turn up, and planting them. If we strive after procuring things hard to come at, and either beg them unconscionably of our friends, or buy them at a high price, we get proud of the number of kinds we have collected, or of the superiority of the flowers. This leads to rivalry in the goodness of the flowers. Trouble ensues, and heart-burnings, which are injurious to self-discipline, yield no pleasure, and cause nothing but anxiety."
Yekken was also a poet. The following Tanka was composed by him when he felt death approaching:—
"The past
Seems to me
Like a single night:
Ah! the dream
Of more than eighty years!"
The most distinguished of the Kangakusha was undoubtedly Arai Hakuseki. He was born in Yedo in 1657, his father being in the service of Lord Tsuchiya, a small Daimio of the province of Kadzusa. Hakuseki has fortunately left an autobiography, a very rare kind of literature in Japan, and we have therefore much fuller information regarding his life than is usual in the case of Japanese authors. It was written not for publication (the copy before me is in manuscript), but for the information of his own descendants, so that they might not have the dissatisfaction he himself had experienced of knowing little about their ancestors. This autobiography was written in 1716, after Hakuseki had retired from public life. It is entitled Ori-taku-shiba ("Burning Faggots"),
