wander through the Syracuse of Theocritus,--were not any more of a privilege than is the opportunity actually afforded us to study Japanese life. Indeed, from the evolutional [17] point of view, it were less of a privilege,--since Japan offers us the living spectacle of conditions older, and psychologically much farther away from us, than those of any Greek period with which art and literature have made us closely acquainted. The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that a civilization less evolved than our own, and intellectually remote from us, is not on that account to be regarded as necessarily inferior in all respects. Hellenic civilization at its best represented an early stage of sociological evolution; yet the arts which it developed still furnish our supreme and unapproachable ideals of beauty. So, too, this much more archaic civilization of Old Japan attained an average of aesthetic and moral culture well worthy of our wonder and praise. Only a shallow mind--a very shallow mind--will pronounce the best of that culture inferior. But Japanese civilization is peculiar to a degree for which there is perhaps no Western parallel, since it offers us the spectacle of many successive layers of alien culture superimposed above the simple indigenous basis, and forming a very bewilderment of complexity. Most of this alien culture is Chinese, and bears but an indirect relation to the real subject of these studies. The peculiar and surprising fact is that, in spite of all superimposition, the original character of the people and of their society should still remain recognizable. [18] The wonder of Japan is not to be sought in the countless borrowings with which she has clothed herself,--much as a princess of the olden time would don twelve ceremonial robes, of divers colours and qualities, folded one upon the other so as to show their many-tinted edges at throat and sleeves and skirt;--no, the real wonder is the Wearer. For the interest of the costume is much less in its beauty of form and tint than in its significance as idea,--as representing something of the mind that devised or adopted it. And the supreme interest of the old--Japanese civilization lies in what it expresses of the race-character,--that character which yet remains essentially unchanged by all the changes of Meiji.