If we turn to the literature of the time, the progress was remarkable, more easily perceivable than in any other department. We had now not only ballads as before, but short epics also. Such a change must of course be attributed to the influence of the Chinese literature assiduously cultivated. In the year 751 a collection of 120 select poems in Chinese, composed by the 64 Nara courtiers since the reign of the Emperor Tenchi, was compiled and named the _Kwai-fu-so_. These poems are quite Chinese in their diction, rhetoric, and strain, resembling in every way those by first rate Chinese poets, and may fairly take rank among them without betraying any sign of imitation or pasticcio. If we consider that no kind of Japanese literature in its own mother tongue could be committed to writing, save only in Chinese ideographs, the influence of the Chinese literature, which flourished so rampantly at that time in Japan, cannot be estimated too highly. No wonder that, parallel to the compilation of the Chinese poems, a collection of Japanese poems, beginning with that of the Emperor Yuryaku in the latter half of the fifth century, was also undertaken. This collection is the celebrated _Man-yo-shu_. The long and short poems selected, however, were not restricted, as in the case of the _Kwai-fu-so_, to those by courtiers only. On the contrary, it contained many poems sung by the common people, into which no whit of Chinese civilisation could have penetrated. The _Man-yo-shu_, therefore, is held by Japanese historians to be a very useful source-book as regards the social history of the time.