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Rh maintained the traditional canons of the art in all their rigidity, and the nation was glad of a new and more unconfined field for its poetical talent. To write tolerable Tanka required a technical training, for which the many had neither time nor opportunity, but there was nothing to prevent any one with ordinary cleverness and a smattering of education from composing Haikai. Saikaku, an unlearned man, is said to have produced twenty thousand stanzas of this kind of poetry during one day's visit to the shrine of Sumiyoshi, and to have received on that account the cognomen of "the twenty-thousand old man." The story is an obvious exaggeration, but it shows what an easy thing Haikai writing was thought to be.

Bashō belonged to a Samurai family, hereditary retainers of the Daimio of Tsu, in the province of Ise. He acquitted himself with credit in an official capacity connected with water-works in Yedo, but for some reason threw up his appointment and entered the Buddhist priesthood. He built himself a cottage in the Fukagawa district of Yedo, and planted a banana-tree beside the window. It grew up and flourished, and from it he took the name of Bashō (banana), by which he is known to posterity. He was a diligent student of the Zen Buddhist doctrines and of Taoism, and was also an artist. From time to time he took long excursions to the remotest parts of Japan, leaving behind him traces of his presence, which remain to this day, in the shape of stones inscribed with poems of his composition. On one of these journeys he took suddenly ill, and died at Ōsaka in the fifty-first year of his age.

Shōtei Kinsui relates the following incident which happened on one of Bashō's tours. It illustrates the favour