it is feared that these notes have
been destroyed. If their value were in any respect such as we have
reason to expect from the man's character, this would be a loss not easy
to exaggerate. It is still wonderful to the Japanese how far he
contrived to push these explorations; a cultured gentleman of that land
and period would leave a complimentary poem where-ever he had been
hospitably entertained; and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a
great wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida's passage in very
remote regions of Japan.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is
thought necessary; but Yoshida considered otherwise, and he studied the
miseries of his fellow-countrymen with as much attention and research as
though he had been going to write a book, instead of merely to propose a
remedy. To a man of his intensity and singleness, there is no question
but that this survey was melancholy in the extreme. His dissatisfaction
is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of
reform; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his
task. As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of
Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country
was then illustrated by the manners of overriding barbarians, and the
visits of big barbarian warships: she was a country beleaguered. Thus
the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have defeated
itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-powerful foreigners,
whom it is now one of his chief merits to have helped to introduce; but
a man who follows his own virtuous heart will be always found in the end
to have been fighting for the best. One thing leads naturally to another
in an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from effect to
cause. The power and knowledge of these foreigners were things
inseparable; by envying them their military strength, Yoshida came to
envy them their culture; from the desire to equal them in the first,
sprang his desire to share with them in the second; and thus he is found
treating in the same book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of
Kioto and of the establishment, in the same city, of a university of
foreign teachers. He hoped, perhaps, to get the good of other lands
without their evil; to enable Japan to profit by the knowledge of the
barbarians, and still keep her inviolate with her own arts and virtues.
But whate