within the family was very loose, perhaps much weaker than in the Highland clans in Scotland. Such dissension should be attributed to the fact that those who passed under the same family name of the Minamoto or the Taira became soon too numerous to present a united front always, whenever a conflict with the rival family arose. At any rate the feud between the respective main branches of the two families was very bitter and inveterate, covering many generations. Of the two, the Minamoto, hardened by constant warfare with the still savage tribes in the north, and trained by the privations unavoidable in wars, surpassed the Taira in robustness and bravery. The Taira became, on the contrary, as the result of close contact with the courtiers at Kyoto, more refined than the Minamoto. Though alternately employed as generals in war as well as instruments in intrigues, the Taira were thought by the Fujiwara to be more docile, and therefore were more trusted than the Minamoto. This is why the former were able to seize possession of the government earlier than the latter. Kiyomori, the first and the last of the Taira, who was made the highest minister of the crown, as if he were himself one of the Fujiwara nobles, was able to reach that goal of the ambition of courtiers, by intruding himself among them, intermingling his sons and grandsons with the flower of the Fujiwara, and at last he made one of his daughters the consort of the Emperor Takakura. His only distinction as compared with the old nobles was that his personal character was too rough and soldier-like, and the means he resorted to were too drastic and forcible, for the over-refined members of the Fujiwara. Kiyomori had in his quality too much of the real statesman to be an idle player in the pageants and ceremonies of the court, and it is said that he often committed blunders through his unseemly deportment as courtier, and became, on that account, the laughing-stock of the Fujiwara. Nevertheless he, like the most of the Fujiwara, could not rid himself of the mistaken idea, that the statesman and the courtier were the same thing, so that none could be the one without being the other. The younger members of the family were reared up rather as courtiers than as soldiers, trained more in playing on musical instruments, in dancing, and in witty versification of short poems than in the use of weapons.