ruptible, and a railway-guard or a postman would look upon a 'tip' as an insult.

That Japanese merchants, as a class, have earned for themselves an evil reputation is only the natural result of their history. During the régime of the Tokugawa Shoguns, traders were regarded almost as social pariahs. Foreign trade was rigidly forbidden, and internal trade was hampered by monopolies, by guilds as arbitrary as the most bigoted of our own trade-unions, by different currencies, and by the total absence of communication or intercourse between adjoining provinces governed by rival and independent feudal chiefs. When Japan was opened in a limited degree to foreign trade, respectable native traders, dulled by centuries of oppression and restriction to narrow spheres, naturally failed to grasp the new opportunities that were afforded them; while on the other hand needy and unscrupulous adventurers, destitute of every sentiment of honour, and guided in all transactions solely by the desire for gain by any means, foul or fair, and with no reputation to lose among their own countrymen, flocked to the open ports, and speedily secured for themselves a practical monopoly of foreign trade. It was with these men that British merchants in Japan were first brought into contact. It is with their descendants-many of them now enriched beyond what their progenitors could have foreseen even in their wildest dreams, but largely preserving the inherited taints of trickery, dishonesty, and disregard of good name—that the majority of resident merchants continue to deal, in spite of the fact that they still continue to suffer at their hands almost as severely as in past times. Is it surprising that, with an experience limited to men of this class, there should be many bitter memories of broken contracts, fraud and deceit, or that the sufferers should be tempted into hasty generalisation about a whole people?

Better days are now dawning. Even in the feudal times there were great mercantile houses in Japan, and we find their successors in many Japanese firms which have entered the field in late years and now carry on a arge part of the foreign trade of the country. Against these no lack of probity in its best form has ever been charged. Commercial schools are inculcating commercial morality as an essential part of business enterprise; trade

is no longer confined to those destined for it by descent; and youths of gentle birth, freely adopting commercial careers as they now do in large numbers-bring with them traditional ideas of honour. An instance which occurred not many months ago, in which a native bank endeavoured by a contemptible quibble to shuffle out of a contract with a foreign bank, affords a striking illustration of the change for the better which has come over the country. The action of the Japanese bank was condemned in the strongest terms in the courts of justice and the press, by other native banks and by public opinion, to such an extent that it was speedily forced to withdraw from the position it had taken; while eight years ago a similar action on the part of a dealer in cottonyarns towards a British firm, a most unscrupulous evasion of a petty contract by a man of great wealth, not only passed unnoticed in the press but was cordially and vigorously supported by the whole guild of yarn-dealers. Mr Chamberlain, in his book, 'Things Japanese,' has given a full account of this incident, mentioning the defaulter by name; but he has omitted to state that the personage in question was almost immediately afterwards elected a member of the municipal council of Yokohama, and is still a director of one of the greatest banks in Japan.

However, things are doubtless steadily improving. Since the day, nearly thirty years ago, when the Emperor, on the opening of the first railway in Japan, gave recognition to the principle that trade might not be wholly dishonourable by receiving an address from a deputation of Japanese merchants, and when Baron Shibusawa resigned high official rank, to which birth and talent had elevated him, in order to adopt a commercial career, the social status of the trader has been steadily rising. The successful merchant now freely mixes on equal terms with the best in the land; and Baron Shibusawa is not the sole representative of his class in the peerage. May we not then, on our part, hope that the one blot which stains the commercial progress of Japan will soon be removed, and that her merchants as a class will in no long time attain a standard of honour and upright dealing which will place them on a level with our own?

Art. IX.-WELSH ROMANCE AND FOLKLORE.

1. The Text of the Mabinogion, and other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest. Edited by John Rhys, M.A., and J. Gwenogvryn Evans. Two vols. Oxford: J. G. Evans, 1887.

2. Les Mabinogion, traduits en entier pour la première fois en Français, avec un commentaire explicatif et des notes critiques. Par J. Loth. Two vols. Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1889.

3. Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx. Two vols. By John Rhys, M.A., D.Litt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901. 4. The Mabinogion. Mediaval Welsh Romances. Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. New edition, with notes, by Alfred Nutt. London: Nutt, 1902. (First edition, in three volumes. London: Longmans, 1849.)

Of the three poetic matters which, to the exclusion of all others, were pronounced by an old French trouvère* to be worthy of concern, one alone, the matter of Britain, retains its vitality for the maker, as distinguished from the reader and the student, of literature. It was the latest of the three to become known in Europe generally, but it ousted the other two from literary favour with astonishing rapidity. Compared with the 'matter of Rome the great' which, while signifying to the French poet not much more perhaps than the tales of Troy and of Alexander, embraced well-nigh all known antiquity, but had none the less been all but exhausted, the sudden and predominant vogue of the matter of Britain' was largely due to its novelty. But it could not claim any advantage in this respect over the matter of France,' which had to do with events of a much later date and more determinate character, and had besides, for French writers at least, its patriotic interest to recommend it. The Carlovingian romances, however, even in France itself, speedily and hopelessly lost ground before the sweeping advance of the Arthurian legends. Alexander,' as M. Jusserandt tersely puts it-and, we may add, Charle* Jean Bodel, in the thirteenth century 'Chanson des Saisnes,' i, 6, 7 : 'Ne sont que trois matières à nul home antandant, De France, et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant.'

+ 'Literary History of the English People,' vol. i, p. 131.

magne had been an amusement; Arthur became a passion.'

This triumph of the 'matter of Britain' over the other two was due mainly to its adaptability to the conditions and demands of a time ripe for new literary enterprises. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the lettered classes in Europe were no less bent upon experiment and adventure than the crowd of writers who, three hundred years afterwards, felt the impetus of the great Italian Renaissance; and the Arthurian legend prevailed with them, in a word, because of its unrivalled possibilities of literary exploitation. It lent itself even to the reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible ideals of knight-errantry and of the Church; and the strange blend of chivalric with ecclesiastical and remote pagan elements, which the fully developed legend eventually became, cast over the imagination of Europe a spell which has not yet lost its potency. When, in course of time, the allegorical capacity of the legend came to be fully realised, its literary triumph was complete. Romance and allegory, fable and symbolism were wedded in the legend of Arthur as in no other; hence its strange fascination for almost every type of the poetic temperament.

As in the nature of things it should be, that fascination has been felt most of all by British poets; but it is not its British origin alone that accounts for the persistent domination of the story of Arthur, evoking, as it has, even in nineteenth century England, some of the most brilliant poetic achievement of the time. It is its superexcellence as a purely romantic subject that has given Arthurian fable its vogue and interest in England as elsewhere. British though the legend unquestionably is in its origin and in its rudimentary literary form, yet, as Renan has said, 'the heroes of the "Mabinogion" have no fatherland'; and the matter of Britain owes 'its astonishing prestige throughout the whole world' to its ideal and representative character. To only two or three British bards at most has it been given to rise to the full height of what poetic argument the Arthurian legend has; and the very difficulty of capturing its secret may be another of the

* Essais de Morale et de Critique' (Paris, 1859)—'La Poésie des Races Celtiques,' p. 410.

causes of its importunate charm. Few poets have been able to leave it alone. In England, at any rate, ever since Sir Thomas Malory quarried among formless masses of mediæval romance and pieced out of them the mosaic of his matchless prose narrative, no poet of quality has been without concern for the story of King Arthur, or has withstood the impulse to venture on some fresh Arthurian quest. The fairy Arthurian realm still claims the poets as its citizens, and among them the fellowship of the questing knights is still preserved. One of the most distinguished of them among the living* finds, indeed, but little substance in some of these 'wan legends' of early Britain as compared with the more solid' matter of Rome the great,' and laments that

'Dead fancy's ghost, not living fancy's wraith,

Is now the storied sorrow that survives

Faith in the record of these lifeless lives.'

But he is fain to justify himself for dallying with them by citing illustrious precedent:

'Yet Milton's sacred feet have lingered there,

His lips have made august the fabulous air.'

It is, however, Milton's misfortune that he has to be classed with Dryden as one who

'In immortal strain

Had raised the Table Round again,'

but for other preoccupations.

The prime glories of achievement remain with Spenser and Tennyson, andshall we say ?-with Mr Swinburne himself.

The Arthurian legend has in our time ceased to be the exclusive property of the poet and the romancer. An army of Arthurian specialists' in the various departments of mythology, philology, ethnology, and folklore has recently annexed whole provinces of the legend, and is busily engaged in assigning prosaic causes and explanations to incidents and names which the lover of mere literature has for centuries been content to leave inviolate in the dim atmosphere of romance. Matthew Arnold, perhaps, little expected what was in store for those who

* Mr Swinburne in the Dedication to his tragedy of 'Locrine,'