3. "Japanese Girls and Women," by Miss A. M. Bacon. This modest volume and its sequel, A Japanese Interior, give in a short compass the best account that has yet been published of Japanese family life,—a sanctum into which all travellers would fain peep, but of which even most old residents know surprisingly little. The sobriety of Miss Bacon's judgments and the simplicity of her style contrast almost piquantly with Lafcadio Hearn's tropical luxuriance.
4. "Tales of Old Japan," by A. B. Mitford (Lord Redesdale), an old book, but always fresh. Love, revenge, the "happy despatch," adventure by land and sea, quaint fairy-tales, Buddhist sermons quainter still,—in a word, the whole picturesque life of Old Japan,—these are the things which Mr. Mitford gives us; and he gives them in a style that renders them doubly attractive.
5. "A History of Japanese Literature," by W. G. Aston. All that the outside world can ever hope to understand, or is ever likely to wish to learn, about Japanese poetry and prose is here compressed by the most accurate, and yet least pedantic, of scholars into the limits of a single octavo volume. This history of the Japanese mind during twelve centuries—for such in effect it is—shows how illusory are the common European notions of "the unchanging East;" for all, from 700 to 1900, were centuries of change, most were centuries of progress.
6. "The Soul of the Far East," by Percival Lowell. With a dazzling array of metaphysical epigrams, this distinguished Bostonian attacks the inner nature of the Japanese soul, whose hall-mark he discovers in "impersonality." Nothing on earth—or elsewhere—being too profound for an intellect so truly meteor-like in its brilliancy, Lowell, in his later work, Occult Japan, discovers to us Japanese possession, exorcism, and miracle-working, whose very existence had scarcely been suspected.
7. "Evolution of the Japanese," by Rev. Sidney L. Gulick. An elaborate and masterly study of the mental characteristics of the Japanese people, undertaken with special reference to that sweeping change in their institutions which the latter half of the nineteenth century inaugurated.
