poems of any very high order of merit. What cannot fail to elicit our admiration is the manner in which the company drill imposed on all government schools and adopted in most private schools as well, has been responded to by the scholars. Even little mites of boys bear the flag stoutly, march miles in the blazing sun, and altogether carry themselves so as to show that an enemy attempting to land on these shores must count, not only with every able-bodied man, but with every child throughout the empire.
Art. The beginnings of Japanese art, as of almost all things Japanese excepting cleanliness, can be traced to China through Korea. Even after Japanese art had started on its independent career, it refreshed its inspiration from time to time by a careful study and imitation of Chinese models; and Chinese masterpieces still occupy in the estimate of Japanese connoisseurs a place only hesitatingly allowed to the best native works. Even Chinese subjects preponderate in the classical schools of Japan. Speaking of the productions of the classical Japanese painters, Dr. Anderson says: "It may safely be asserted that not one in twenty of the productions of these painters, who to the present day are considered to represent the true genius of Japanese art, was inspired by the works of nature as seen in their own beautiful country." Whatever Indian, Persian, or Greek strain may be detected in Japan came through Korea and China in the wake of Buddhism, and is accordingly far less marked—if marked at all—in genuinely native Japanese paintings and carvings than in those archaic remains which, though often inaccurately spoken of as Japanese, were really the handiwork of Korean or Chinese artists or of their immediate pupils.
The most ancient painting now existing in Japan is a Buddhist mural decoration in the temple of Hōryūji near Nara, believed to date from A.D. 607 and to be the work of a Korean priest. For more than two centuries longer, art remained chiefly in Korean and Chinese priestly hands. The first native painter of
