Oh, the pity of it! the profound pathos in the picture, in Sekiyen’s preface of the little “Outa” holding his treasured prize, “la petite bestiole,”—the childish artist-hands of the embryo master clasping the insect so gently to preserve its ephemeral life, yet later plunging into the dissipation and excesses which shortened his own. Living with the déclassé, however we may gloss their imperfections and cover with the cloak of charity their sorrowful calling, he became himself a cynic, an outcast, an iconoclast, learning that “hardening of the heart which brings “Irreverence for the dreams of youth.” Though Utamaro was one of the greatest of the popular artists, his demoralization led to the decadence of his school, which later was regenerated by the great master of Ukiyo-ye, Hokusai, the artist of the people. In Hokusai, “Dreaming the things of Heaven and of Buddha,” breathed the pure spirit of art,—that Spirit of poetry and purity which calls to us in Milton’s immortal lines: “Mortals, that would follow me, Love Virtue; she alone is free. She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or if Virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.” The Romance of Hokusai. Master of Ukiyo-ye. “_From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-five I have learned a little about the real structure of nature,—of animals, plants and trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do—be it but a line or dot—will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I, to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five by me,—once Hokusai,—today Gwakio-rojin, ‘the old man, mad about drawing.’_” “_Ars longa, vita brevis_,” though a time-worn aphorism, seems the best comment upon these words of Hokusai, which preface the “Fugaku Hiak’kei” (Hundred Views of Fuji). Judging from what he had accomplished, before his death in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, and the continual increase in his powers, it is easy to believe that had his life been extended to the limit he craved, the prophecy would have been fulfilled. M. Louis Gonse says of Hokusai, “He is the last and most brilliant figure of a progress of more than ten centuries—the exuberant and exquisite product of a time of profound peace and incomparable refinement.”