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or ninety retainers to support his rank; and we must therefore content ourselves, for the present, with the commercial advantages secured by the Earl of Elgin, and satisfy ourselves as to the condition and habits of the people of the interior of Japan as they were reported and observed by our forefathers. Happily for us, the aspect of an Asiatic nation does not change as rapidly as in Europe. A picture of any state in our quarter of the globe drawn two hundred years ago would hardly be recognisable to-day; but it is not so in Japan, China, or many other places we could name. The Japanese of to-day are just the same people first seen by Pinto and praised by Xavier. The very cut of their garments is unchanged, they shave the tops of their heads and brush up their back hair as in the sixteenth century, and although their curiosity and skill are as great as when they imitated the petronels of their Portuguese visitors and Toledo blades of the Spaniards, yet they are in all other respects that same people of the isles of the day-dawn who repelled Kublai-khan’s fleets and armies, and preferred heathen independence to the Christian vassalage of the Church of Rome.

Street in the suburb of Yedo. (Fac-simile.)

Let us turn therefore, to the people themselves, and leave the history of their foreign relations until we again take up the theme, in the modern visits to Japanese seaports. The first thing that strikes us is the strange coincidence between Marco Polo’s report of 1295, and the accounts given in letters written by Adams three hundred years subsequently, of the general character and disposition of the Japanese. He dwells especially upon the good administration of the laws, and the order everywhere prevalent, as well as the courtesy and valour of the people. But it must not be denied, that there was a dark side to this picture, for none of our writers pretend that the Japanese are a heaven-born race, free from the usual taints of frail mortality. Jealous of foreign interference, contented with their own laws and institutions, they at the same time, unlike the Chinamen, were full of curiosity as to the