Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/73

 moonlight shone on ruins only, and the autumn wind told sad stories of the past." But when the Hōjō family fell from power and Kamakura ceased to be the seat of government, Kyōtō quickly recovered its old importance. An anonymous placard exposed at the market-place in the early part of the fourteenth century gave the following picture of the metropolis:—

The things that abound in the capital now are night-attacks; robberies; forged Imperial decrees; calls to arms; galloping messengers; empty tumults; decapitations ; recusant priests and tonsured laymen; degraded nobles and upstart peers; gifts of estates and confiscations of property; men rewarded and men slaughtered; eager claimants and sad petitioners; baggage consisting of manuscripts only; sycophants and slanderers; friars of the Zen and priests of the Ritsu; leaps to fortune and neglected talents; shabby hats and disordered garments; holders of unwonted batons and strangers asking the path to the Palace; Imperial secretaries who affect wisdom, but whose falsehoods are more foolish than the folly of fools; soldiers saturated with finery, who wear hats like cooking-boards and strut about fashionably at the fall of evening in search of beautiful women to love; wives who simulate piety but live lives abominable to the citizens; official hunters holding each an emaciated hawk that never strikes quarry; leaden dirks fashioned like big swords and worn with the hilts disposed for ready drawing; fans with only five ribs; gaunt steeds; garments of thinnest silk; second-hand armour hired by the day; warriors riding to their offices in palanquins; plebeians in brocade robes; civilians in war panoply and surcoats; archers so ignorant of archery that their falls from their