Rome. By dint of perseverance we extract his ore and leave his dross, and then clutch sweet Purchas, who startles us by stating, on authority which may not be denied, that in Japan, “where our countryman Williams Adams doth now reside, and hath been there these many years, therefore hath better means to know than any one,” there are two mountains, one of which casteth out flames, and where the Devil might be seen in a bright cloud by such as prepared themselves for the sight by due preparation of mind and body! For a moment we trembled. Could this be our beautiful Fusi-hama, the “matchless one of Ni-pon?” Was she like other peerless ones, merely a snare and a delusion, handing her votaries over to the Evil One in a bright and dazzling cloud? Gracios a Dios! No; further on we recognised her, for the ancient writer mentioned another mountain, our Fusi-hama, as being “many leagues higher than the clouds.” Bother that burning mountain and its unpleasant occupant: we felt so relieved, and turning to our “Hundred Phases of the Matchless Mountain,” published in Yedo, we rejoiced like the travellers who, in the early morn, halt on the highway, and gaze upon her grand proportions in wonderment and love as she towers above that great empire, and daily blesses the millions at her feet.
Travellers. First view of Fusi-hama. (Fac-simile.)
But let us begin our tale of Japan, and try to carry our reader back to the old, old time, A.D. 1300, when Venice and Genoa were as great as we yet hope they will, one day, again become. It was, then, five centuries and a half ago, that Zipangu, the Chinese barbarism for Nipon, was first heard of in Europe, and that through the narration of the brothers Polo. They had just returned from their wanderings and sojournings in Tartary and China, and men hardly knew what to believe of the marvels they related.
That first news of Nipon was brief, yet admirably calculated to awaken the curiosity and cupidity of races who had for ever been accustomed to look to the remotest East, as a land of wondrous wealth, where gold, precious stones, and almost as precious spices, were as dross. Lands which, if the mail-clad warlike sons of Western Europe could only reach, their strong arms and stout hearts would enable each impoverished knight and desperate soldier to carve out a kingdom for himself. Marco Polo had not visited Japan, but he had dwelt long in China; he was the first and last European who ever held office under the Chinese Government, and it was from the Chinese that he had learnt of the great islands to the eastward. “Zipangu!” for so he calls Nipon, “is an island in the Eastern sea, very great in size; the people of a white complexion, of gentle behaviour,—in religion idolators,—and they have a king of their own. They have gold in great plenty; their king permits no exportation of it, and they who have