their investiture direct from the Ten-shi who was _de jure_ ruler at the ancient capital of Kioto, while they, as vicegerents, held their semi-imperial courts at Yedo. The rise of the military power dates from the days of Hideyoshi, whose ambition it was to subjugate Korea and add the peninsula to the Empire of Japan. But all his efforts, from one cause and another, were frustrated, and when in 1598 he died, after six years of ineffectual strife, the idea was for a time abandoned, his successor, Iyeyasu, as we have already seen, choosing the path of internal reform as that by which he would seek fame, rather than that of foreign conquest. Hideyoshi had restored order to the land, and it was for his successor in the exalted office to consolidate and strengthen the influence which the Taiko had acquired with the feudatory chiefs, and to carry onward to complete fulfilment the work of centralisation so boldly begun. Hidetada, as the second Shogun, followed in his father’s footsteps, though his tastes lay rather in the direction of art, but it was reserved for Iyemitsu to perfect Iyeyasu’s policy, and it was by Iyemitsu that Japan was closed for the time to foreign intercourse. In 1617 all Japanese ports excepting Hirado and Nagasaki were barred to strangers, and four years later the subjects of the Ten-shi were forbidden to visit foreign lands. In 1624 all foreigners save the Dutch and the English were banished from Japan;—and in 1637 there took place the terrible massacre of Christian converts at Shimabara in Kiushiu. By 1638 aliens of every sort save the Dutch had been expelled, and the Hollanders remained only on promise of faithful compliance with severe restrictive laws, and at the sacrifice in great measure of their personal liberty. Christianity, it was supposed, had been rooted out, but it was found in after years to have survived to some degree, in the vicinity of Nagasaki, the persecution to which its adherents were subjected. Thus though the Anti-Christian edicts were promulgated during the latter part of Iyeyasu’s life it was by his grandson, who succeeded Hidetada, that the policy of extermination was resolutely carried into effect. How far the action of the Shogunate was prompted at this time by the dread of foreign encroachment is to be gathered from the proclamations issued at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Hideyoshi, moreover, is said to have paid more attention than it deserved to the idle boast of the Portuguese that it was the practice of their monarch to first send missionaries to convert the natives of a country to his own religion and next to send an army which, aided by the converts, contrived to overrun the land and add it to his dominions. Iyemitsu said in reference to this report:—