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This rescript indicated three courses, one of which the shogun was asked to choose: namely, first, that he himself should proceed to Kyoto for the purpose of there conferring with the principal feudatories as to the best means of tranquillizing the nation; secondly, that the five principal littoral fiefs should be ordered to prepare coast defences, and, thirdly, that Keiki of Mito and the feudatory of Echizen should be appointed to high office in the Bakufu administration.
It is stated that the expenditures involved in producing this history, together with a five-hundred-volume work on the ceremonies of the Imperial Court, amounted to one-third of the Mito revenues, a sum of about 700,000 ryo.
The messengers to whom the box was entrusted were ordered to travel with all speed, and, on arriving in Yedo, to repair forthwith to the Yanagisawa mansion, there handing over the skins with a written statement that the Mito baron, having found such articles useful in the cold season, availed himself of this opportunity to submit his experience together with a parcel of dressed hides to the shogun through Yoshiyasu.
The leaders were beheaded, banished, or ordered to commit suicide; the Mito feudatory being sentenced to perpetual confinement in his fief; the daimyo of Owari, to permanent retirement; and Keiki, former candidate for the succession to the shogunate, being deprived of office and directed to live in seclusion.
He immediately caused the young daimyo of Kii to be nominated successor to the shogunate, and he signed the Harris treaty. A vehement outcry ensued. It was claimed that the will of the Imperial Court had been set at nought by signing the treaty without the sovereign's sanction, and that unconditional yielding to foreign demands was intolerable. The Mito baron headed this opposition.
The edict had not been publicly promulgated, but it had come into the possession of the Mito feudatory, and by his orders had been enclosed in the family tomb, where it was guarded night and day by a strong troop of samurai. The Bakufu insisted that to convey such a document direct from the Throne to a feudatory was a plain trespass upon the shogun's authority.
This marked the commencement of a vigorous revival of Japanese literature in the Bakufu capital. Moreover, in Osaka a scholar named Keichu Ajari published striking annotations of the celebrated anthologies, the Manyo-shu and the Kokin-shu, which attracted the admiration of Tokugawa Mitsukuni, baron of Mito. He invited Keichu to his castle and treated him with marked consideration.
*Kusunoki Masashige is the Japanese type of a loyal and true soldier. He was forty-three at the time of his death. Three hundred and fifty-six years later , Minamoto Mitsukuni, feudal chief of Mito, caused a monument to be erected to his memory at the place of his last fight. It bore the simple epitaph "The Tomb of Kusunoki, a loyal subject."
Mito, however, refused to surrender it. The most uncompromising conservatives of the fief issued a manifesto justifying their refusal, and, as evidence of their sincerity, committed suicide. Nariaki, the Mito baron, now instructed his vassals to surrender the edict. He may have shared the views of his retainers, but he was not prepared to assert them by taking up arms against his own family.
Mr. Max Muller asks, 'What would Mr. Andrew Lang say if he read the words of Signer Canizzaro, in his "Genesi ed Evoluzione del Mito" , "Lang has laid down his arms before his adversaries"? Mr. Lang 'would smile. And what would Mr.
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