In this brief resumé we cannot follow the fluctuations of Japanese Art through the centuries. During long periods of conflict and bloody internecine strife, art languished; when peace reigned, then in the seclusion of their _yashikis_ these fierce and princely warriors threw down their arms and surrendered themselves to the service of beauty and of art. Nor had the dainty inmates of their castles languished idly during these stirring times. Often they defended their honour and their homes against treacherous neighbours. It was a Japanese woman who led her conquering countrymen into Corea. In the arts of peace the cultured women of Japan kept pace with their lovers and husbands. A woman revised and enlarged the alphabet, and some of the most beautiful classic poems are ascribed to them. Well might the Japanese fight fiercely for his altar and home, with the thought of the flower-soft hands that were waiting to strip him of his armour and stifle with caresses the recollection of past conflict. The early history of Japan suggests a comparison with ancient Greece, and the Japanese poets might have apostrophized their country, as did Byron the land of his adoption: “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace,— Where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung!” Happily Japan, unlike Greece, withstood the enervating influences of luxury and the passionate adoration of beauty. Princes laboured alike with chisel and with brush, and the loftiest rulers disdained not the tool of the artisan. Art Industrial kissed Grand Art, which remained virile beneath the sturdy benediction. Therefore Japan lives, unlike Greece, whose beauty in decay called forth that saddest of dirges, ending, “’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.” In Japan, art lightens the burden of labour, utility and beauty go hand in hand, and the essential and the real reach upward, and touch the beautiful and the ideal. Genroku. The Golden Era of Romance and Art. The Nen-go of Genroku, from 1688 to 1703, was that period of incomparable glory which the Japanese revere as the French do the time of Louis the Fourteenth. Peace had long reigned and art flourished under the fostering care of the Tokugawa Shoguns. Then lived the great worker in lacquer, Korin, pupil of Sotatsu, the flower painter, unrivalled artists who had absorbed the secrets of both Kano and Tosa. Itcho, the grand colourist, flourished, and Kenzan, brother of Korin, the “Exponent in pottery decoration of the Korin School.”