they have become, and their gardens would speak a different language, their message would not be the same.
A quotation from Mr. W. G. Aston’s Japanese Literature will, perhaps, illustrate my meaning. He is speaking of the days of the Shogunate, when everything Chinese was admired and copied at the expense of all that was fresh and unspotted in literature, art, manners, and morals in Japan:—
“As time went on, the code of morals derived from the 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 that was fatal to any reasonable share of personal freedom. In short, the great fault of the later Shogunate 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,
