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MARY VANCE.

WHEN I was young and had the skill To take the tune of Cupid's making, And teach my sweetheart from the hill A pretty trick for dear escaping; When by the constant lavender,

Or gipsy rose she stayed to parley, Oh, cheerily went my feet to her Along the road to Varley.

Ah, Mary Vance, when you with me

Were keeping starlit company,

The mile of bliss,

The laugh and kiss,
From Shepperton to Varley!

Not warm enough my lips to keep
The lips of Death from cold caresses.
Oh, weary head, to never sleep

Upon her heart, amid her tresses!
No more to watch the foam of light
Run lipping over seas of barley,
For Death the harvester by night
Went down the road to Varley.

Ah, Mary Vance, when you with me
Were keeping starlit company,

The mile of sweet
Between the wheat,

From Shepperton to Varley.

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WE are so tired, my heart and I,
Of all things here beneath the sky
One only thing would please us best-
Endless, unfathomable rest.

We are so tired; we ask no more
Than just to slip out by life's door;
And leave behind the noisy rout
And everlasting turn about.

Once it seemed well to run on too
With her importunate, fevered crew,
And snatch amid the frantic strife
Some morsel from the board of life.

But we are tired. At Life's crude hands
We ask no gift she understands;
But kneel to him she hates to crave
The absolution of the grave.
MATHILDE BLIND.

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From The Edinburgh Review.

book," and asking questions "with the directness of a census-taker." 2

THE PROBLEMS OF THE FAR EAST.1 MARCO POLO is nowadays left no- The transition from Japan to China where by every globe-trotter who, with is regarded by most travellers — to use a few months and a couple of hundred Mr. Curzon's words" as one from pounds to spare, takes a ticket "from sweetness to squalor, from beauty to Loudon to London" round our steam- ugliness, from civilization to barbarspanned planet. The vague and won- ism, from warmth of welcome to cheerderful "Cipango," vainly steered for less repulsion." They are no long by Columbus and Cabot, has become favored guests, but "foreign devils;" vulgarized by glib descriptions. As they are followed by lowering glances, likely as not the first man in a club has if not met with open insults; they are sailed through the Inland Sea, has smothered with dust or plunged in stared at the sun-descended mikado, reeking mud, deafened by dissonant and brought sham curios from the ere- sounds, and disgusted by loathsome while capital of the tycoon. He, no sights. Garbage and vermin on sale as doubt, called in besides at a couple of food tempt Celestial appetites; "cat seaports of the Middle Kingdom, and and dog" restaurants invite custom thus gathered contrasted impressions within rifle-range of the stately Bund of the two countries, easily anticipated of Shanghai; while dead rats occupy heforehand. With Japan he was de- an honored place in poulterers' shops. lighted and amused. He found him- The attendant odors are best left to the self in a land of flowers and smiles and imagination. They are strong enough, neatly picturesque landscapes. The it has been suggested, to kill the very newest things out, in the line of "Cau- microbes, and so mitigate the ravages casian" progress, surrounded him. of epidemics! They belong to the Everything was strictly up to date. mysteries of the East. Even in spickTelegraph-boys on bicycles raced past and-span Tokio and Yokohama, Eurothe mostly demolished city fortresses pean olfactories learn to "suffer and of the daimios; English-speaking po- be still." For to all Oriental cleanlilicemen, in immaculate white uni-ness there is a dessous des cartes. forms, stood at every street corner; Japanese dwellings, fresh and spotless "scale-mailed" Armstrong cruiser in what meets the eye, are too often probably rode at anchor in Tokio Bay; whited sepulchres. newspaper-vendors emulously hawked. their daily wares. Nay, if the visitor was a poet, a baronet, or a journalist, he had to undergo, on behalf of the native press, an interview with "a dapper little gentleman, in appearance about nineteen, dressed in faultless foreign fashion tennis shoes, flannel trousers, white waistcoat, blue coat, flowing necktie, spectacles, and pith helmet-speaking English with the accuracy and impressiveness of a copy

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Our annual literary harvest includes, as a matter of course, a crop, by no means inconsiderable, of books relating to these parts of the world. Most are of an ephemeral character, and we have named as one of the best specimens of this class Captain Younghusband's "On Short Leave to Japan." Its pages brim over with good-humor and high spirits; there are not too many of them, and they convey, in an unpretending manner, some authentic and important information about military matters.

The first three works of which the titles form the heading of this article belong to a different category. Each of them forms a permanent contribu tion to knowledge; each is the out

Norman, The Real Japan, p. 38.

come, not of personal experience alone, | ships from the south, exterminated a but of personal experience fructified more primitive race, and gradually took by diligent inquiry and serious thought. full possession of their island abodes. Their publication within a short inter- Their first arrival may be referred to val is, at the present juncture, a par- about 600 B.C., when the symmetrical ticularly fortunate circumstance, of cone of Fuji-yama had not yet, if tradiwhich we gladly avail ourselves to at- tion is to be believed, been thrown up tempt an estimate of the actual situa- to form the most distinctive feature of tion in the Far East. Japanese scenery. The military orThe sudden apparition of Young|ganization which had made them irreJapan "all furnished, all in arms," and sistible hardened, as their conquests her striking deeds of prowess, have set became assured, into an unmitigated Europe agape. Few gave the Japan- feudal system. "Home Rule all ese credit for more than a doll's-house round" was enjoyed with with a vencivilization. They seemed to the West-geance. Each of the great vassals, or ern public like vivacious children, clap- daimios, exercised sovereign rights ping their hands delightedly at having within his province, and levied war at secured real furniture for miniature his discretion outside it. He was also apartments where nobody lived, and head of a clan, and thus claimed by a real pots and saucepans for miniature double title the allegiance of retainers kitchens where nothing was cooked. nominally, at least, of the same lineage Their marvellous facility in appropria- as himself. A shadowy supremacy betion naturally won applause, since longed to the mikado,1 a personage of "imitation is the sincerest flattery." solar origin, who led a life of mystic But it was a patronizing applause, the seclusion in the sacred city of Kioto. kind of aptitude involved not being But he was no more emperor of Japan suggestive, on the face of it, of under-than Dagobert was king of France. lying strength. We have learned His edicts were, most likely, at no time within the last few months to think differently. Japan has emphatically vindicated her right to be treated as a power of no mean order. She has, in Mr. Norman's words, "at length come into her inheritance. The child of the world's old age' has proved to be its most remarkable offspring."

promulgated from shore to shore of so much as one of the three thousand islands owning his ineffectual sway. And his original authority, such as it was, slid away from him in the course of centuries to a lieutenant called the shogun, or tycoon. The office became hereditary in the thirteenth century, and was grasped in 1603 by the strong hand of leyesu, the first of the Tokugawa dynasty. By him was initiated the appalling persecution by which the

An offspring owing its existence to a Minerva birth - a product of thought rather than of growth, modern Japan is a standing protest against "evolutionary" laws. She has been modelled flourishing Christian Church founded in all her parts, and set on foot as a by St. Francis Xavier was extirpated, going concern, by individual efforts; the peasantry being simultaneously reand so recently that her makers are duced to a state of quasi-serfdom. He still her rulers. It is to be hoped that brought the daimios under subjection, they may escape the destiny of Frank-abrogated the right of private war, and enstein. But they are not altogether established a peace which remained secure from it. For the clay shaped unbroken for two and a half centuries. by them has life in it-life so ener- An unexampled state of society subgetic that it may prove explosive. And sisted during that time. Foreigners the Japanese Demos has "the passions were expelled in 1624; commerce of its kind.'

The present inhabitants of the archipelago are not aboriginal there. They came, a nation of rude warriors, in

almost ceased; Japan closed its gates and lived on its own resources. The

1 A title equivalent in meaning to the Sublime Porte. It has now fallen into desuetude.

the ringing grooves of change," they are less disposed than ever to halt and survey what has been left behind.

land was divided between the sho-strings" of the past. They look begun and two hundred and sixty-five fore, not after. Since the rapid "spin " daimios, of whom eighteen were for- of the last couple of decades "down midable potentates. They enjoyed large revenues, and maintained at their courts bodies of hereditary clansmen at their entire devotion. These samu- Art flourished at the courts and rai, amounting to one-tenth of the through the patronage of the daimios. entire population, constituted an aris- The princes and popes of the house of tocratic caste privileged to commit the Medici scarcely outdid them in liberal happy despatch in emergencies, and to appreciation of genius. Philosophy, carry two swords. Presumably, then, too, although a mere barren outgrowth they were ambidextrous, like the son of Confucianism, was cultivated; and of Pelegon, who hurled a pair of inef- histories of a subversive tendency were fectual spears against Achilles on the written. The entire literary movement bauks of Scamander. One of M. de of Japan throughout the eighteenth Hérédia's finely wrought sonnets gives century was, in fact, like that of a vivid picture of an old Japanese gen-France, towards revolution. Impatleman-at-arms. The following translation has been placed at the disposal of the writer of the present article :

THE TWO-SWORD MAN.

With fingers o'er the strings that lightly

glance,

Through bamboo-lattices of fabric slight,
She sees approach o'er sandy levels white
The conqueror of her dreams of love's ro-

mance,

Two-sworded, fan upraised, doth he ad

vance.

Red girdle, scarlet acorn, take the light
Thwart the dark mail; and on his shoulder,
bright,

Hizen's or Tokungawa's cognizance.
This warrior, brave with swords and plates
ashine,

Seems in his bronze, his silk and lacquer

fine,

Some great crustacean mailed in black and red.

tience with existing arrangements thus crept in; discontents became rife; and the country grew to be full of restless spirits on the watch for opportunities of innovation.

These were afforded by insistent foreigners. Commodore Perry, of the United States navy, hewed the first gap in the isolating briar-fence in 1854; and the trading concessions extorted by him could not be denied to the English, Russians, and Dutch. Then, four years later, the tycoon (as the shogun was now entitled) signed formal treaties with the powers. the old social fabric. Widespread agino less; yet the act sealed the doom of tation set in. The daimios procured warships, introduced European artillery, armed forts, unfurled a national flag showing on a white ground the Their prep

He sees her. Smiling 'neath his visor's red ball of the rising sun. mask,

He makes the sunlight flash, with quickened tread,

From gold antennæ quivering on

casque.

his

He could do

arations being at length complete, they took the field, dismissed the vanquished tycoon, seized in 1868 the inviolable person of the mikado, installed him at Yedo (renamed Tokio), and converted his titular into a de facto sovereignty.

It is curious to reflect that a species which has only become extinct within the last twenty years should already An extraordinary event then took appear antediluvian. The samurai be- place. Feudalism committed "happy longed to an order of things not only despatch." With virtual unanimity, dead and buried, but well-nigh for- the daimios surrendered their fiefs to gotten. The Japanese have no antiquarian attachments, and next to no historical memories. They take no pleasure in harping on the "mouldered

the suzerain they had just enthroned, accepting instead ten per cent. of their former revenues. They did not, however, relinquish power. The foremost

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