MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
that one of the pagodas cost a hundred times as much as thirteen pagodas of a century later. Of a third he says that "its fifty pagodas stood like a row of stars." And his eulogies end with the lament: "Alas! The city of flowers which was expected to last for ten thousand years, became a scene of desolation; the home of the fox and the wolf. Even the temples of Tōji and Kitano, which survived for a time, were ultimately reduced to ashes. Peace succeeds war, rise follows fall in all ages, but the catastrophe of the Ōnin era (1467) obliterated the ways of Emperor and of Buddha at once. All the glories of Imperialism and all the grandeur of the temples were destroyed for ever. Well did the poet write: 'The capital is like an evening lark. It rises with song and descends among tears.'"
Something must be allowed for the obvious exaggeration of this writer, but the fact remains that the city of Kyōtō attained its zenith of grandeur in the middle of the fifteenth century; that it was reduced, a few years later, to a mere shadow of its former self, and that it never again recovered its old magnificence. Yet, even in the days of which the writer quoted above speaks in such glowing terms, Kyōtō could not compare with the city that was destined to grow up in the east of the country during the eighteenth century under the sway of the Tokugawa Shōguns.
One more quotation, from a work compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, may be
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