tions were at their worst. From
various, provinces people flocked to the capital seeking food, and
deaths from starvation became frequent in the city. A Buddhist
priest, Gwana, constructed grass huts to which the famished sufferers
were carried on bamboo stretchers to be fed with soft, boiled millet.
It is recorded that, during the first two months of 1462, the number
of persons thus relieved totalled eighty-two thousand. Another
Buddhist priest erected a monument to the dead found in the bed of
the river below the bridge, Gojo. They aggregated twelve hundred.
Scores of corpses received no burial, and the atmosphere of the city
was pervaded with a shocking effluvium.

But even the presence of these horrors does not seem to have sobered
the Muromachi profligate. The costly edifices were pushed on and the
people's resources continued to be squandered. Even the Emperor,
Go-Hanazono, was sufficiently shocked to compose a couplet indirectly
censuring Yoshimasa, and a momentary sense of shame visited the
sybarite. But only momentary. We find him presently constructing in
the mansion of his favourite retainer, Ise Sadachika, a bath-house
which was the wonder of the time, a bath-house where the bathers were
expected to come robed in the most magnificent costumes. One of the
edifices that formed part of his palace after his retirement from
active life, in 1474, was a "Silver Pavilion" intended to rival the
"Golden Pavilion" of his ancestor, Yoshimitsu. During the last
sixteen years of his life--he died in 1490--he patronized art with a
degree of liberality that atones for much of his previous profligacy.
In the halls of the Jisho-ji monastery, constructed on a grand scale
as his retreat in old age, he collected chefs d'oeuvre of China and
Japan, so that the district Higashi-yama where the building stood
became to all ages a synonym for choice specimens, and there, too, he
instituted the tea ceremonial whose votaries were thenceforth
recognized as the nation's arbitri elegantiarum. Landscape gardens
also occupied his attention. Wherever, in province or in capital, in
shrine, in temple, in private house, or in official residence, any
quaintly shaped rock or picturesque tree was found, it was
immediately requisitioned for the park of Higashi-yama-dono, as men
then called Yoshimasa, and under the direction of a trio of great
artists, So-ami, Gei-ami, and No-ami, there grew up a plaisance of
unprecedented beauty, concerning which a