Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/102

60 would still remain typical of the national mind and hands which produced it.

It is a great satisfaction for one who loves the Japanese to note that stone lanterns were not, as everything else in the artistic line appears to have been, introduced into Japan from China. They seem to have been a veritable product of the natural genius of the people, and are employed everywhere. I have never seen them in a Chinese garden, and, so far as I know, they are never used in them.

The first lantern of this sort appears to have been set up in the fourth century by a certain Prince Iruhiko, the son of the Emperor Sinko, beside a lonely lake in a spot infested with robbers. Whether this little glimmering light illumining the dark served to frighten the bad men away or helped the samurai to see to kill them off is not stated, but, at any rate, after awhile it was taken to the Tachibana Temple at Yamato, and set up in the grounds there.

This beginning was possibly what caused lanterns to become such popular adornments to temples, Shinto as well as Buddhist, where, lining the avenues of approach, they stand in their hundreds, and even in their thousands, like sentinels with their torches held aloft.

Lanterns may be roughly separated into two types: those with legs and those without, although it would perhaps be more accurate to say those which are set up off the earth by