To translate is to travesty, for the French language seems to be the only medium through which can be filtered the nuances of Japanese thought, which elude the ordinary elements of language, like the perfume of flowers, the bouquet of delicate vintages. Our blunt Anglo-Saxon mars that picture language, where one flexible, curved calligraphic stroke conveys to the æsthetically receptive oriental imagination what stanzas of rhyming rhapsody fail to define. Sir Edwin Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn approach the French, are, so to speak, orientalized. Ordinary English fails to give a Japanese equivalent. It is too emphatic, too objective; it suggests the dominant British hobnail upon the delicate Tea-house tatami—that immaculate, beautiful matting, into whose uniform lines embroidered draperies dissolve deliciously. Oh, those dreams of dresses!—the warp and woof of the visions of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, of Harunobu and Kiyonaga, Toyokuni and Kunisada, and all the rest, the idols of Parisian colourists! “For us,” says M. de Goncourt, “Utamaro painted violet dresses, where, upon the border, _degradation rosée_” (fading into Beni, that mystic tint, the spirit of ashes of rose), “birds are swooping,—violet dresses, across which woven in light, zigzag insect characters, composing the Japanese alphabet,—violet dresses, where Corean lions, grim and ferocious, crouch, gleaming in shading of old bronze within the purple folds! Dresses of mauve, smoky, shading into bistre, where the purple iris unsheathes its head from the slender gray-green stalk!” Mourasiki-ya (maison mauve) was the name of the atelier of Utamaro. “Robes of that milky blue the Chinese call ‘blue of the sky after the rain,’ beneath clusters of pale rose peonies; dresses of silvery gray, fretted with sprays of flowering shrubs, making a misty moonshine; pea-green dresses, enamelled with rosy cherry blooms; green dresses, fading into watery tints, hidden by groups of the pawlonia, the coat of arms of the reigning family; purple costumes, channelled with water courses, where mandarin ducks pursue each other around the hem. Oh, the beautiful black backgrounds, controlling the scintillating mass of colour! Black robes sown with chrysanthemums, or showered with pine-needles, worked in white. Black dresses, where finely woven baskets are mingled with sceptres of office! ‘Oh! les belles robes!’ he cries, where flights of cranes dissolve into the distance, where birds are fluttering, where lacy fretwork of fans and little garlands are interwoven!—a motive delighted in by Utamaro as a framework for beloved faces.” All that is beautiful in nature and art lived and breathed in these dresses, upon which the loving hand of the painter left a grace in every fold.