the country still cultivated the more difficult language, and wrote their books in it. The incorporation of Chinese sounds into the native Japanese, seems to have arisen from the necessity of distinguishing between the various meanings of the Chinese character, so that while the native word would express one, the original sound would express another, but the unchangeable symbol stand for both to the eye. The admiration of the Chinese characters, led in time to the invention of a second syllabary, having the same sounds but far more difficult to learn from the number of characters in it and their complicated forms. It is called _hirakana_, or "equal writing," because it is intelligible without the addition of Chinese characters; it is now the common medium of communication, in epistolary composition of all kinds, story books, and other everyday uses. There are one hundred and one characters in the _hirakana_, or nearly three modes of writing each of the forty-eight syllables, and they are run together as rapidly and far more fancifully than in our own running-hand, when that is compared with the Roman character. The characters are mostly contractions of Chinese characters used simply as phonetic symbols, without any more reference to their meaning than in the _katakana_. The more ancient of the two is now usually employed in dictionaries, by the side of Chinese characters in books to explain them to the reader, or at their bottom to indicate the case of the word. In reading a Chinese book, a good Japanese scholar makes a kind of running translation into his own vernacular, sometimes giving the sound, and sometimes giving the sense, and the _katakana_ is used in the latter case, to indicate the tense, or case of the native word. Having the Chinese language as well as its native stores to draw from, the Japanese is both copious and flexible, and by its syllabic construction, also euphonious and mellifluous, in these respects being far superior to the Chinese. The following stanza is from one of the Dutch writers; it is written with thirty-one syllables. Kokorodani makotono, Michi ni kanai naba, Inorazu totemo kamiya Mamoran.