And thus, amidst breathless silence, they stand minute after minute, neither yielding by a hair's breadth, neither visibly distressed, although the sweat begins to run from their glistening bodies. What price Osaka? It looks as if, in a trial of strength so conditioned, sheer weight must end by telling. Presently the umpire, a quaint figure in gay kimono and silken haori, irresistibly reminiscent of an actor in The Mikado, rises and begins to prowl round the combatants with soft, catlike strides, fan in hand. After making the circuit of the ring perhaps half-a-dozen times, he taps one of the men on the shoulder with his fan, and immediately they fall apart. Time is up; the bout has ended in a draw. During the rather protracted interval allowed for repose much excited chattering arises among the spectators, partisan feeling running high, no doubt; but there are no signs of loss of temper anywhere, and hushed expectation falls upon the assemblage once more when the rivals step forth to meet in a second essay. The umpire places them carefully on the precise spot and in precisely the same posture as when they were separated; which seems a little hard upon Osaka, who is somewhat at a disadvantage through his right arm being held, so to speak, in chancery. However, he has an air of confidence which should be reassuring to his friends, and one guesses, without quite knowing why, that he means to employ a more active system of tactics this time. Almost at once, indeed, he does something (exactly what he does only a quick and skilled eye could detect) which causes his colossal opponent to sway perceptibly. A swift change of grip follows; the Kyoto champion throws back one massive leg, then the other, yielding unmistakably, drawing nearer and nearer to the fatal chalk line. Now, friend Osaka, one last, supreme effort, and the day is yours. But Osaka has shot his bolt. Very slowly he, in his turn, has to fall back and resign the inches that he has gained. And now, lo and behold! up flies his right arm as before, and the old position, from which neither competitor seems capable of shifting the other, is resumed. The umpire renews his stealthy, feline gyrations, bending double and flirting his fan; at length comes the tap on the shoulder which proclaims truce, and all is over. There is to be no third encounter; honors are divided; Kyoto and Osaka may retire to their respective borders with laurels undiminished, if unaugmented. The result, to judge by the applause, gives general satisfaction. Bets, it must be assumed, are off; but were there any on? One likes to think not. Inveterate borrowers though the Japanese are, they have a discriminating gift, and if, in their keenness to grasp the kernel of Western civilization, they have sometimes assimilated too much of the husk, they have seldom been slow to discover and repair their error. May these wrestling contests, which seem to be their sole form of popular sport, remain for ever free from adjuncts which bid fair to degrade and destroy most forms of sport in certain other islands that we know of. Here at last, in Kyoto, is a wet day. Last night there broke over the hillencircled, gray-roofed city a not unwelcome thunderstorm, accompanied by a veritable deluge, which has now dwindled to a steady, determined drizzle. Through the streets, ankle-deep in mud, splash pedestrians on high clogs, their garments wrapped tightly round their legs, their shoulders protected (more or less) by oil-paper rain-cloaks and flat umbrellas of the same material held above their heads. From the overhanging eaves and gutters streams descend upon these last, which sometimes cause the bearers to stagger; all the swaying lanterns and signs which hang along and across the thoroughfares are woefully bedraggled, and as one pokes one's nose out between the leathern apron and the lowered hood of the jinrikisha, to see how other folk are getting on, one is strongly impressed with the idea that the use of paper is overdone in a climate liable to such visitations. On the other hand, it does not cost much to buy a new rain-cloak or a new umbrella, while, as for mud, the process of removing that from bare legs is swift and easy. At all events, the bad weather does not seem to keep anybody at home, nor need it prevent the hooded, leatheraproned sightseer from letting himself be whisked about to the temples, monasteries, parks, and palaces in which the old capital is so rich. Of the former, perhaps the finest and most interesting are the Nishi Hongwanji and Higashi Hongwanji, which adjoin one another and are the headquarters of the wealthy Monto sect of Buddhists. Both are vast treasure-houses of lacquer, bronze, painted screens, and jewelled altars. In the neighboring monastery, divided by sliding panels, are the usual long suites of empty rooms with polished floors, immaculate matting, coffered ceilings, and wallpaintings on paper, which are but dimly visible on this cloudy day. The cornices of carved wood, representing birds and flowers, are some of them more than a foot thick, and, although pierced, have designs ingeniously differing on the one side from those on the other. What time and patience must have been expended upon thinking them out! The Nishi is called the Mikado's temple, the Higashi that of the people-no misnomer, seeing that it has been rebuilt entirely by popular subscriptions since it was burnt down forty years ago. The total cost is said to have been a million yen (about 100, 0001.), and it is fully equal to its neighbor both in architectural design and in elaborate ornamentation; which does not look as though either Japanese faith or Japanese art were on the wane. Is Japanese art doomed to perish? In a pictorial sense it is already dead -never, perhaps, despite its charm of dexterity, poetry, and color, possessed the elements of permanence or growth. But is it the case that the beautiful painstaking work in porcelain, lacquer, bronze, ivory, and enamel, which to most of us represents what is really glorious in the art of Japan, must cease to be produced under the changed conditions of to-day? Unfortunately, a high authority, the author of Things Japanese, seems to think so. He points out-quite truly, of coursethat under the old régime the Japanese ceramists, lacquerers, workers in metal and enamel, were not hirelings, but artists and clansmen, faithful to their feudal chief. "By him they were fed: for him and for the love of their art they worked . . . time was no object ... there was no public of mediocre taste to cater for . . . the art was perfectly and essentially aristocratic." Hence he concludes that "it is a mere piece of amiable optimism to suppose that such a tradition can be kept up in the days which have produced that frightful, but aptly descriptive term, 'art manufacture.'" It may nevertheless be permissible, with all proper deference, to take a more sanguine view. Shoguns and daimyos have passed away; but the old artistic spirit remains among a people who have changed their laws, their customs, and, in some degree, their dress, but who have not changed-indeed, could not change-their national character. Here, to-day, in Kyoto, Namikawa is polishing in his little workshop pieces of cloisonné as charming in design and coloring, as perfect in finish, as any that have ever seen the light of his native land. Another artist of the same name at Tokyo, who works in a different and, as some people think, an inferior style-but it is a matter of opinion-has more orders than he can execute. At Nagoya, too, whence comes a third form of cloisonné, applied to silver, with the cloisons generally invisible, Kumeno and others are assiduously carrying on the difficult, minute handicraft. These enamellers are enthusiastic, and are not greedy. Although they work hard, their annual output is small, for in the repeated processes of baking which are required many pieces are destroyed. Consequently their wares are expensive. They do not make large fortunes. Doubtless they might, if they cared to turn out rubbish in profusion; doubtless rubbish is turned out in profusion and fortunes are made. But that matters little so long as what is honestly good and enduring is not choked out of existence. Why, after all, should it be? Given the survival and vitality of the artistic spirit (which must surely be conceded), given a sufficient number of purchasers, native or foreign, to provide the craftsman with a living wage, and it does not seem so desperately optimistic to believe that what has been will continue to be. Hope, moreover, is fortified when one remembers that a very large proportion of the so-called "old" Japanese porcelain, lacquer, metalwork, and enamelling is not in reality old at all. The finest examples of the microscopically ornate Satsuma ware, for instance, were painted little more than half a century ago, while cloisonné work was brought to its present pitch of perfection long after Commodore Perry, cruising in Far Eastern waters, brought up off Yedo to mention to those whom it might concern that feudalism was out of date. Lacquering, though a very ancient craft, has had quite recent tri umphs, which connoisseurs pronounce on a level with those of the best periods, and nothing in the past can exceed for beauty the embroideries, brocades, painted silks, and cut velvets of to-day. Let it be frankly admitted, all the same, that the actual aspect of Japanese towns is not of a nature to reassure æsthetic persons. It is difficult to understand how or why an art-loving race has endured such hideous disfigurement of its streets. Streets, too, in which fires have ever been so common and so easily kindled! In Kyoto, the home and symbol of old Japan, the capital of many generations of dignified, powerless Mikados, the eye is less distressed than elsewhere by monstrous, inappropriate modern constructions; yet even in Kyoto, alas! are tramcars, electric lights, aggressive telegraph-posts and wires. Indispensable though these accompaniments of twentieth-century life may be, one cannot help feeling that if they are to prevail urban picturesqueness must go, and with it by degrees that appreciation of what is fitting and picturesque which constitutes what we call good taste. One remembers certain European cities once renowned for their beauty and distinction, and one knows of what their municipal authorities have been capable in these latter days. The end, in any case, is not yet. For many years to come, in all probability, the traveller who knows what to avoid will be able to wander about all day long among the temples and palaces, the hills and gardens of widespread, gray-tiled Kyoto without meeting a solitary European or running against a single telegraph-post. Temples and pagodas innumerable; quaint, stiff gardens, recalling the tea ceremonies of a by gone period; vast, scrupulously dusted, vacant palaces-all these, unchanged and unchanging, breathe a gentle defiance to time. If the Imperial pleasure-grounds and the Mikado's Shishinden, or Hall of Audience, have something of the forlorn melancholy of an abandoned stage, it is not, after all, very difficult for the imagination to repeople them with the sumptuously attired daimyos who in days of yore used to come flocking thither along the Tokaido, attended by numerous retinues of two-sworded Samurai, to pay their respects to the sovereign recluse. Strangely fated recluse who, after a slumber of centuries, woke up one fine morning, at the bidding of a Yankee sea captain, to find that the actual business of governing was in his hands, and who now, arrayed in a French-looking uniform, prances forth to review troops armed with the latest pattern of rifle! We may pardon his gallant soldiers their European uniforms, acknowledging that these were demanded by the sheer exigencies of the case; we may grant that his honorable Ministers must sit henceforth at pigeon-holed writingtables on suitably upholstered chairs; it was time, perhaps, to give up sitting on the floor. But we may also hope, not without confidence, that in due season he and his people will perceive what is worth retaining and what is best rejected out of the extraneous civilization which they have seized with both hands. Surely they will; for whether they deserve or not the epithets of incomprehensible, contradictory, inscrutable, and the like, which one grows a little weary of hearing applied to them, it is not intelligence nor the sifting faculty that will be denied them even by their least flattering critics. Only the other day a sage newspaper scribe observed that "although the Japanese disdain perspective in their pictures, there is no lack of it in their policy." One is a little reminded of the boarding-school young lady who, in an essay on natural history, alluded to the "strange and pa thetic circumstance that the tortoise, which provides us with such beautiful combs for our back hair, has no back hair of its own." However, if the journalist meant to call the Japanese perspicacious, who shall gainsay him? They have originated nothing, say the captious. No; but they have very seldom imitated without improving upon the original, and a wise eclecticism is in itself a form of originality, being so rare. Even supposing the worst comes to the worst, and their cities are destined to approximate more and more closely to the utilitarian model that we know too well, they themselves can never quite sink to a corresponding plane of dreary uniformity. The land. to say nothing of the natural temperament of its inhabitants, will not suffer that. In the future, as in the past, plum and cherry trees will burst forth with each recurring spring into acres of blossom, bamboos will sway and rustle by quiet pools, white foam of mountain torrents will flash between the red boles of lofty cryptomerias, strings of wild geese will take their flight across the pale disc of the moon, the snow-capped cone of Fuji will hover, delicate and phantomlike, in a blue haze between earth and sky. If the Japanese are wanting in originality (but of course they are not), no such reproach can be brought against Japan, which has a character and essence so distinct, so distinguished, so refined, and so inherent that one cannot conceive of it as liable to be vulgarized by any incursion of barbarians. Viewed from the Kiyomizu heights this evening, Kyoto shows as Japanese and as unspoilt as anybody could wish the ancient capital to be. The rainclouds have dispersed; the last rays of the setting sun fire tiled roofs, pagodas, and the Kamogawa stream, with its bridges and riverside tea-houses; one gazes down at the groves and avenues of monastery grounds and at a many colored crowd which is ascending by stairways or by the sharp acclivity of Teapot Hill, where vendors of cheap pottery and porcelain have their booths, to the high-perched temple of the Thousand-handed Kwannon. It is a shrine of great antiquity, and in much favor with the populace, who wend their way hither to toss pebbles on to the stone lanterns which surround it or coins into the extended sheet beside which a parchment-visaged Buddhist priest squats and taps his insistent gong. Should the cast pebble alight on the lantern and remain there, the suppliant is in luck and will obtain the object of his desire; but perhaps here, as at other shrines, it is a surer plan to employ cash, which cannot miss its mark and should be entitled to its equivalent. The sun sinks, the brief afterglow and twilight of late summer follow; then on a sudden the whole city, spread out beneath the spectator's feet and sloping up towards them, breaks, as if by enchantment, into a galaxy of tiny sparks, some stationary, some darting hither and thither, like a swarm of fireflies. East and west, Longman's Magazine. north and south, the illumination extends until the entire prospect is a blaze of light. Every householder hangs out a string of paper spheres or cylinders, every man, woman, and child carries one suspended at the tip of a bamboo cane, and presently bonfires leap up into flame on the wooded hillsides; for the Bon matsuri has begun, and processions are starting, with measured chant and beat of drum, from all quarters in honor of this annual feast of lanterns. Witnessed from above, it is the most charming, fantastic, fairy-like spectacle that can be imagined; seen at closer quarters in the thronged, narrow streets, it resolved itself into a popular carnival, noisy and hilarious, but perfectly good-tempered. There is no drunkenness, no quarrelling, nor will there be any cracked heads, although the merrymaking is to be prolonged for many hours to come. Not before the night is far spent will lanterns and torches be extinguished, one by one, and the climbing moon look down out of a mother-of-pearl sky upon a city and a population which seem to smile still in their sleep. W. E. Norris. THE REAL SLAV TEMPERAMENT. The Slav has been reproached with leaving but a faint mark on history; he is thought to have done little for "liberty" and "progress." Perhaps he is judged too much by the higher political and administrative organs of the Russian Empire, which does not seem to yield the fruits of a good tree. It may be argued, however, that the Slav has been disabled by circumstances from developing on natural lines and preserving in their purity his primitive traditions. In the things of this world, in mili tary and political matters, he has had less success than the Teuton, though he has perhaps fared better than the Celt. The Celts have been thrust back into the extreme west of Europe; and the lands on which they live form part of the territory of States shaped on Teutonic lines. There never has been a Celtic State; but the Slav at least has founded various States, and some of them have struggled through to the present time. It is true that all have had great vicissitudes, and some have lost their independence, and even し |