The Japanese Envoys who visited London last year have pub-
lished the diary they kept,- and we trust some English publisher will have the spirit to obtain a literal translation. The account which is going the round of the papers does not indicate much shrewdness of observation. The Envoys seem to have been chiefly struck with the impudence and independence of our women, and the absence of visible distinctions of rank. The women, they say, dance everywhere, and run like men, "while the men run along the street in the arms of women." The men are rough, proud, in- different to rank, and capable of visiting the theatre, which the Envoys, like the Recordites, evidently think very wrong. The account reads a little as if it had been cooked, only a European would scarcely have invented the remarks that the "Londoners unequivocally demonstrated that they thought us ugly," and -" everybody in the theatre, perhaps from distraction, levelled a spying-glass at us." There is the true Oriental naivete' in those sentences, the good Japanese, like all other Asiatics, believing that they are describing the ways and habits of races equidistant between themselves and the monkeys.
Previous page
