Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/325

 century. And in speaking of the first seven and a half decades, it is not intended to suggest that the year 1875 saw the end of her artistic metal-work. On the contrary, the reader already knows that the art has merely developed new phases in modern times, and that not only are its masters as skilled now as they were in the days of the Goto, the Nara, the Yokoya, and the Yanagawa celebrities, but also that their productions must be called in many respects greater and more interesting than those of their renowned predecessors. If sword-mounts alone be considered, the year 1876 may be taken as the time of the art's demise, for in 1876 the wearing of swords was interdicted and purchasers of their furniture were at once reduced from hundreds of thousands of samurai and privileged persons, to a few scores of foreign curio-collectors. Thousands of grand specimens found their way at once to the melting-pot for the sake of the modicum of precious metal that could be extracted from them, and in an incredibly short time the multitude of master-pieces that must have existed in 1876 disappeared almost completely. The fate of that great assemblage of beautiful objects is indeed a mystery. Hundreds of skilled experts had been engaged continuously during five centuries on their production; millions of samurai had taken a pride in their possession, and the objects themselves were imperishable. Yet in less than thirty-five years they virtually ceased to be procurable in Japan. It is true that a considerable number went to Europe and America, and that an equal, or perhaps even a larger, number remained in Japanese collections. But what comparison can be set up between the petty fraction thus accounted for and the vast multitude