From the days of Kwammu downward, the sovereigns in succession encouraged learning. The university in Kyōto and the public schools in the provinces were in a flourishing condition, and many private schools sprang into existence. The patronage of great nobles was munificently exercised in the cause of education. Further, great numbers of students were engaged in compiling not only the history of the empire, but also many other works of a general character, so that learning occupied a high place in popular esteem. But unfortunately the scholarship of the age drifted into superficialities of style to the neglect of practical uses. Writers of verses applied themselves to imitating Chinese poets, and writers of prose thought only of constructing their phrases in such a manner that combinations of four ideograms should in regular alternation be followed by combinations of six--a form of composition known as the _Shirokuheirei_ (four-and-six order). But despite this slavish adherence to valueless forms, a notable literary achievement has to be placed to the credit of the era; namely, the elaboration of the syllabaries, the _hira-kana_ and the _kata-kana_. The first syllabary ever used in Japan had been the _manyō-gana_, in which the Chinese ideograms were used phonetically with little attention to their original meaning. But to write a Chinese ideogram for each syllable of a Japanese word involved much labor, since in many cases a single ideogram was composed of numerous strokes and dots. The difficulty was gradually lessened during the Nara epoch by the simplification of Chinese characters to such an extent that only a rudimentary skeleton of each ideogram was symbolically used to represent its sound. The syllables thus obtained were arranged in a table of fifty sounds, constituting the _kata-kana_. Thenceforth, instead of the pain of committing to memory thousands of ideograms, and employing them with no little toil, it became possible to record the most complex thoughts by the aid of fifty simple symbols. Nevertheless, since the nation had come to regard Chinese literature as the classics of learning, scholars were still compelled to use Chinese ideograms and to follow Chinese rules of composition, so that the cursive forms of the Chinese characters became the recognized script of educated men. These cursive characters possessed one advantage: they were capable of considerable abbreviation within certain limits. Naturally, the facility they offered in that respect was more and more utilized, until at length their forms were modified to comparative simplicity. When the great prelate Kūkai composed, for mnemonic purposes, the rhyming syllabary which comprised all the necessary sounds without repetition, the forms of the simplified characters may be considered to have finally crystallized into the syllabary known as the _hira-kana_.