have, in Eastern Asia, arisen only after the criminal law has been completely systematised.

The ritual opens by calling upon the assembled princes of the mikado's family, the ministers of state, and all other officials, to listen, in words which are a modern addition after the establishment of a form of administration modelled on that of the Chinese. To this succeeds a second enumeration of the sovereign's servants, according to the old division, into scarf-wearing companies (women attendants), sash-wearing companies (cooks), quiver-bearing and sword-bearing companies (guards), with which begins the genuine ancient text. The nature of the mikado's title to rule over the land is then stated, as in the ritual of the gods of pestilence, already quoted, after which we have a list of the offences of which the nation is to be purged.

Amongst the various sorts of offences which may be committed in ignorance or out of negligence by heaven's increasing people, who shall come into being in the country, which the Sovran GRANDCHILD'S augustness, hiding in the fresh RESIDENCE, built by stoutly planting the HOUSE-pillars on the bottom-most rocks, and exalting the crossbeams to the plain of high heaven, as his SHADE from the heavens and SHADE from the sun, shall tranquilly rule as a peaceful country, namely, the country of great Yamato, where the sun is seen on high, which he fixed upon as a peaceful country, as the centre of the countries of the four quarters thus bestowed upon him-breaking the ridges, filling up watercourses, opening sluices, double sowing, planting stakes, flaying alive, flaying backwards, and dunging; many of such offences are distinguished as heavenly offences, and as earthly offences; cutting living flesh, cutting dead flesh, leprosy, proud flesh, the offence committed with one's own mother, the offence committed with one's own child, the offence committed with mother and child, the offence committed with child and mother, the offence committed with beasts, calamities of crawling worms, calamities of a god on high, calamities of birds on high, the offences of killing beasts and using incantations ; many of such offences may be disclosed."

The high priest then arranges the sacrifices, and, turning round to the assembled company, waves before them a sort of broom made of grass, to symbolise the sweeping away of their offences. At this point occurs in the original a direction to the priest to repeat "the great ritual, the heavenly ritual," which has exceedingly puzzled most of the commentators, because the said ritual is not forthcoming from the authorised collection of rituals. By the industry of Hirata, however, several versions of what seems to be the missing document have been discovered, and it turns out to have been a short address to all the gods, calling upon them to hear the remaining part of the principal ritual, which describes how the sins of the people are swept away and

got rid of by the gods of purification, after which the original proceeds :

"When he has thus repeated it, the heavenly gods will push open heaven's eternal gates, and cleaving a path with might through the manifold clouds of heaven, will hear; and the country gods, ascending to the tops of the high mountains, and to the tops of the low hills, and tearing asunder the mists of the high mountains and the mists of the low hills, will hear.

"And when they have thus heard, the Maiden-of-Descent-into-theCurrent, who dwells in the current of the swift stream which boils down the ravines from the tops of the high mountains, and the tops of the low hills, shall carry out to the great sea plain the offences which are cleared away and purified, so that there be no remaining offence; like as Shinato's wind blows apart the manifold clouds of heaven, as the morning wind and the evening wind blow away the morning mist and the evening mist, as the great ships which lie on the shore of the great port loosen their prows, and loosen their sterns to push out into the great sea plain; as the trunks of the forest trees, far and near, are cleared away by the sharp sickle, the sickle forged with fire; so that there cease to be any offence called an offence in the court of the Sovran GRANDCHILD'S augustness to begin with, and in the countries of the four quarters of the region under heaven.

"And when she thus carries them out and away, the deity called the Maiden-of-the-Swift-cleansing, who dwells in the multitudinous meetings of the sea-waters, the multitudinous currents of rough seawaters shall gulp them down.

"And when she has thus gulped them down, the lord of the Breathblowing-place, who dwells in the Breath-blowing-place, shall utterly blow them away with his breath to the Root-country, the Bottomcountry.

"And when he has thus blown them away, the deity called the Maiden-of-Swift-Banishment, who dwells in the Root-country, the Bottom-country, shall completely banish them, and get rid of them.

"And when they have thus been got rid of, there shall from this day onwards be no offence which is called offence, with regard to the men of the offices who serve in the court of the Sovran, nor in the four quarters of the region under heaven."

Then the high priest says:

"Hear all of you how he leads forth the horse, as a thing that erects its ears towards the plain of high heaven, and deigns to sweep away and purify with the general purification, as the evening sun goes down on the last day of the watery moon of this year.

"O diviners of the four countries, take (the sacrifices) away out to the river highway, and sweep them away."

The horse is emblematic of the attention with which the gods will deign to listen to the prayer offered up on behalf of the

people by the high priest, as representative of the mikado. By modern commentators the first of the four deities who take charge of the sins of the people, and carry them off to the nether world, is identified with the gods of evil, who sprang from the defilement washed off from his body by Izanagi, after his return from the kingdom of the dead, and the following two, the Maiden of-Swiftcleansing and the Lord-of-the-Breath-blowing-place, are explained to be the Great-Corrector and Divine-Corrector deities created by him to amend the evil caused by the former. They are less successful in their attempts to clear up the obscurity which to their eyes seems to surround the name of the Maiden-of-SwiftBanishment. The necessity incumbent upon an orthodox adherent of the ancient creed, of accepting every myth as a statement of indisputable fact, renders it impossible for him to adopt modes of interpretation which to the student of comparative mythology appear both obvious and necessary. That defilements, in order to be got rid of, should be removed to the nether world, the country inhabited by the dead, who at their departure from life had been a cause of pollution to all their kin and household dependants, was a perfectly natural suggestion, and what was needed in order to complete the idea was a means of conveying the defilements to the place whence they were supposed originally to have proceeded. The polluted objects, and the expiatory sacrifices, to which various kinds of pollution were by a fiction supposed to be transferred, as in the case of the clothes of the images substituted for the real clothes of the mikado, were cast into the nearest river, to be carried down into the ocean, and so into the region of the dead, which a natural inference placed at the root or bottom of the earth, beyond the sea. The four deities who take part in this transmission are merely personifications of the different stages of which the whole process of purification was imagined to consist. Far from feeling bound to interpret the account of Izanagi's washing which is given in the "Notices of Ancient Things" as the origin of the rite of lustration, we can only see in it a poetical myth intended as a means of giving additional sanctity to a loug-established practice. Izanagi and Izanami having already been invented to account for the existence of the world and the human beings which people it, it was convenient also to put on their shoulders the origin of evil, and the discovery of the expedients by which its results could be avoided. It is their constant predisposition thus to confuse cause and effect, together with their habit of seeing a mysterious signification in every inconsistent fable which they are unable to interpret, that renders the native expositors of the ancient religious books such untrustworthy guides in the search after a clue to their true meaning and import.

The doubt will probably suggest itself to some readers, whether this practice of lustration may not have been derived in some way from China, where certain ideas as to the uncleanness caused to members of a family by a death in the household are well known to exist, while others may be disposed to conjecture that it is a development of doctrines held by the Buddhists with regard to impurity. And it might be urged also that both Chinese philosophy and the Buddhist religious practice had been introduced into Japan long before the date of the ceremonial law in which this ritual and others have been preserved. But we think that the mere fact of similar conceptions having existed in another country among another race of people than the Japanese is not sufficient to establish the theory that they could only have originated in a single centre, from which they spread in various directions wherever the circumstances were favourable, or facilities for their transmission might be supposed to have existed. It would be easy, for instance, to discover striking parallelisms between the notions concerning pollution entertained by the race which practised lustration in Japan and the teachings and rules on this subject contained in the books of the Jewish law; and thus to give another handle to those persons who are bent on discovering in the Japanese nation the remnant of the lost tribes of Israel. Or what coincidence with the ancient Japanese rite could be more remarkable than that a Peruvian Inca, after confession of guilt, should bathe in a river and repeat the formula: “O thou river, receive the sins I have this day confessed unto the sun; carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear," as Dr. Tyler tells us, in his "Primitive Culture." It would, perhaps, be more to the purpose to quote Voltaire's statement that the Kamschatdales performed a rite of purification, though, as they did not appear to entertain any notions of right and wrong, he did not see what they could desire to purify themselves of. For there may easily have been some community of race between Kamschatdales and the aborigines of Japan. But the language of the rituals in itself seems to prove that they were the spontaneous growth of the Japanese mind. There can be little doubt that they existed in an unwritten form long before the introduction of the Chinese written characters. The references which frequently occur in them to an extremely primitive condition of life renders it highly improbable that they should have been composed by people who had already felt the influence of Chinese civilisation, and, under Chinese tuition, had made progress in the social arts. Their grammatical construction, too, is absolutely unlike that of Chinese documents intended to be read into Japanese. Instead of sentences divided into short periods of almost equal length, we have long successions of attributive clauses piled one upon the

other in a manner which, while it unconsciously recognises the philosophical truth that all phenomena are influenced by what has preceded them, is, nevertheless, perfectly characteristic of the Japanese language. And if a further proof were wanting of the authentic character of these rituals, it is to be found in the fact that whenever the priests who committed them to writing met with a word the meaning of which antiquity had already obscured, or which could not be adequately expressed by a Chinese equivalent, they reproduced it, syllable by syllable, in Chinese characters treated merely as phonetic symbols, which certainly would have been unnecessary if the original had been a Chinese model. Until, therefore, similar religious compositions are discovered in some other Eastern Asiatic language we shall confidently rest in our belief that these rituals, as well as the other parts of pure Shintau of which they are the outgrowth, are the native product of the ancient speakers of the Japanese tongue, and not, as some recent writers have too hastily assumed, a conscious imitation of doctrines and myths imported from China.

ART. III.-THE SARACENS IN ITALY.

Storia dei Musulmani in Sicilia. Per MICHELE AMARI. Florence: 1858.

T is a curious, though perhaps idle speculation, to follow out

and try to fancy what would have been the effect on Western civilisation to what extent the current of modern thought would have been deflected, and the tide of modern progress stayed― had Italy, as for a time seemed not improbable, been overrun and occupied like Sicily, by the victorious Saracen hordes.

What manner of renaissance should we have had if Mahometanism, not Christianity, had been its informing spirit-if the Arab, instead of the Latin race, had guided its earliest footsteps -if the subtler but narrower genius of the East had supplanted the broader, more genial, and more universal Italian intellect, in presiding over that new birth of human thought? Would Christian art have been stifled ere it struggled into life, or would the germ from which it grew, taking root elsewhere, have given us perhaps a German Raphael, or a Scandinavian Michael Angelo? How would have fared the buried relics of Pagan art, disinterred by a people whose religion enjoined their destruction? Where would the ancient manuscripts brought to light by the agents of the Italian courts, in every remote corner of Europe, have found their eager commentators and jealous guardians, with a Saracen