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372 as involved in cruel embarrassments by an attempt to impose himself on some provincial virtuosos as the renowned poet and novelist Jippensha Ikku. Ikku says elsewhere that Yaji was intended as a tada no oyaji or "ordinary elderly man." But in truth he is neither Jippensha Ikku nor yet a tada no oyaji. He and his younger companion belong to that class who having never lived can never die. They are humble but not unworthy members of the illustrious fraternity which includes Falstaff, Sancho Panza, Sam Weller, and Tartarin—to us far more real personages than any originals which may have supplied hints for them.

Yaji and Kida are by no means heroes. They are cowardly, superstitious, and impudent. Lies, "gross as a mountain, open, palpable," fall from their lips on the smallest provocation or in mere wantonness. Yaji has a certain share of good sense and bonhomie which goes some way to redeem his character, but Kida is a fool positive whose idiotic sallies and ill-advised amorous schemes are continually entangling him in scrapes from which it requires all the wit and savoir faire of his elder companion to extricate him. Nor is Yaji, from a moral point of view, much better. Both are, in sooth, shameless wights, whose moral principles are on a par with those of Falstaff or Sir Harry Wildairs, and for whose indecency of speech and conduct even Rabelais hardly affords an adequate comparison. The most that can be said for them is that their grossness is the grossness of the natural uncultured man, and not the con amore concentrated filth which revolts us in some European authors, and that with two continents and a wide gulf of social and racial differences intervening, their indecency somehow creates less disgust than if they were Englishmen