from them,
and which it required a strong arm and a quick hand to guard for the
defense of the people. But the Emperor gradually gave up the personal
leadership in war, and passed the duty of defending the nation into the
hands of one or another of the great noble families. The nobles were not
by any means slow to see the advantage to be gained for themselves by
the possession of the military power in an age when might made right,
even more than it does to-day, and when force, used judiciously and with
proper deference to the prejudices of the people, could be made to give
to its possessor power even over the Emperor himself. And so gradually,
in the pursuit of the new culture and the new religion, the emperors
withdrew themselves more and more into seclusion, and the court became a
little world in itself,--a centre of culture and refinement into which
few excitements of war or politics ever came. While the great nobles
wrangled for the possession of the power, schemed and fought and turned
the nation upside down; while the heroes of the country rose, lived,
fought, and died,--the Emperor, amid his ladies and his courtiers, his
priests and his literary men, spent his life in a world of his own;
thinking more of this pair of bright eyes, that new and charming poem,
the other witty saying of those about him, than of the kingdom that he
ruled by divine right; and retiring, after ten years or so of puppet
kinghood, from the seclusion of his court to the deeper seclusion of
some Buddhist monastery.

Within the sacred precincts of the court, much time was given to such
games and pastimes as were not too rude or noisy for the refinement that
the new culture brought with it. Polo, football, hunting with falcons,
archery, etc., were exercises not unworthy of even the most refined of
gentlemen, and certain noble families were trained hereditarily in the
execution of certain stately, antique dances, many of them of Chinese or
Corean origin. The ladies, in trailing garments and with flowing hair,
reaching often below the knees, played a not inconspicuous part, not
only because of their beauty and grace, but for their quickness of wit,
their learning in the classics, their skill in repartee, and their
quaint fancies, which they embodied in poetic form.[26]

[26] In ancient times, before the long civil wars of the Middle Ages,
much attention was given by both men and women to poetry, and many of
the classics of Japanese literature a