pay. It represents at the same time the final syllable of "devotee" and the first syllable of "tea-pot." Perhaps a better example is the following from Butler's Hudibras:—
"That old Pyg—what d'ye call him—malion,
Who cut his mistress out of stone,
Had not so hard a hearted one."
"What is this but a kind of pun?" the reader will not unnaturally say. Yet it would be hardly fair to stigmatise these jeux de mots as puns. They are meant not to provoke laughter, but as ornament, and the effect is sometimes not unpleasing.
At its best, however, the "pivot" word is an ornament of doubtful taste, and poets of the classical period indulge in this figure of speech but sparingly. More remains to be said of it when we come to the dramatists of a later age, who have used it in an extravagant, and, at least to us Europeans, exasperating manner.
Parallelism, or the correspondence between each word of two successive lines or clauses, noun for noun and verb for verb, is an occasional ornament of Japanese, as it is of Chinese poetry. It is familiar to us in the Psalms of David, and is a favourite with Longfellow, whose Hiawatha contains numerous such pairs of parallel lines, as—
"Filled the marshes full of wild-fowl,
Filled the river full of fishes."
Some Japanese examples of this figure will be found in the poems quoted on page 37.
Nara Poetry
While the eighth century has left us little or no prose literature of importance, it was emphatically the golden age of poetry. Japan had now outgrown the artless
