Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/100

 and that the prince of Japanese robbers, Ishikawa Goemon, entering the Taikô's chamber with the intention of assassinating him, silenced the censer by muffling it in an an equally miraculous tabard. Such fables show in what degree of estimation a choice piece of céladon was held by mediæval Japanese, and how highly their appreciative sense was educated. This marvellous censer was a tiny cylindrical vase, about four inches high and as many in diameter. It had only three beauties, perfect uniformity of glaze, a wonderful colour, and the lustre of a gem. Yet it inspired its first owner with such poetic admiration that, carrying it home in his bosom and hearing the musical note of the peewit sounding over a moon-lit moor, it seemed to him a fitting thing to call the peerless censer after the solitary, soft-voiced bird.

The number of fine céladons remaining in Japanese collections is very great. Scarely a temple of note is without some example of the ware, whether vase or censer. Among these, however, the majority cannot safely be referred to factories of earlier date than the Yuan (1279-1368) or Ming (1368-1644) dynasty. It is, indeed, scarcely possible to distinguish between two specimens of Lung-chuan-yao dating respectively from the Sung and the Ming dynasty. The manufacture of the Ju-yao and original Kuan-yao céladons ended with the Sung era, but the manufacture of the Lung-chuan-yao continued at the Liu-tien and Chin-tsun kilns throughout the Yuan dynasty, and at Ch'u-chou-fu, in the same province of Chê-kiang, throughout a considerable portion of the Ming dynasty. At these same factories imitations of the Ju-yao and Kuan-yao were also made, and there is no reason to think that they differed greatly from their