On coming to the land of Nippon, “source of the sun,” known to the outside world as Japan, we must still keep in mind the warning with which we entered China. Japanese art is of Chinese origin, but was modified as it developed. It adapted itself to Japanese tastes, and to the ideas of a people quick to imitate, but possessing a marked national individuality upon which to modify their imitations. When Chinese art began to fall under foreign influence and to renounce its own national characteristics, the more conservative Japanese offered a greater resistance to the overwhelming influx of ideas from abroad. That which had been the strength of Chinese artists now became their weakness. Foreign models gave them new subjects upon which to exercise their marvellous mechanical skill and imitative dexterity, and their artistic nationality was in a measure lost. The Japanese appeared doomed to a similar fate. Western aggressiveness made its impression, and Europe seemed to have led the extreme East captive. The death of an art distinctively Japanese was predicted by some, and by others it was said to have already taken place. These are the views of extremists. It is just possible that the Japanese derived a hint of what their own imitations were likely to be considered by the more fastidious Europeans, from their own opinion of European imitations of the decorations of China and Japan. For it must not be imagined that the imitation was all perpetrated on one side. It is no unusual thing for the frequenter of dealers’ emporiums to find a European vase surmounted by the Dog of Fo, or decorated by birds nowhere visible except to the imagination of a Celestial artist. Art cannot exist in slavery. The European borrowed, and made himself ridiculous; the Japanese imitated, and with servility found degradation. From his temporary aberration it is to be hoped he will thoroughly rouse himself. The contact with Europe which led him to follow after strange gods was not without its lessons. In later times he has shown some capacity for studying and profiting by them. It is the Japanese side of Japanese art that foreigners admire, and not the produce of a foolish combination of the Oriental with the European. It is idle, in view of what may be a lasting return to native models, to bemoan their desertion. The Japanese have already shown a capacity for appreciating their neighbors’ faults and their own merits at a proper value. Comparison is leading them to adopt a standard of criticism; and if they will only persist in cherishing their own good traditions, and in giving play to their distinctively national genius, it will certainly be better for their art, and probably for their commerce also. At the Vienna Exhibition they made the discovery that the imitation of the European had better be abandoned. At Philadelphia they gave proofs of an almost complete emancipation from foreign domination in ceramic art. There is, moreover, abundant reason for the