nant in his revolt because he forgot to bind up his hair
properly before he received a visitor. At Court, etiquette and
ceremony became the only functions of the nominal monarch after the
camera government of the cloistered ex-Emperors had begun. And
aristocratic women, though they might be notoriously unfaithful, kept
up a show of modesty, covering their faces in public, refusing to
speak to a stranger, going abroad in closed carriages or heavily
veiled with hoods, and talking to men with their faces hid by a fan,
a screen, or a sliding door, these degrees of intimacy being nicely
adjusted to the rank and station of the person addressed. Love-making
and wooing were governed by strict and conventional etiquette, and an
interchange of letters of a very literary and artificial type and of
poems usually took the place of personal meetings. Indeed, literary
skill and appreciation of Chinese poetry and art were the main things
sought for in a wife.

ENGRAVING: ARIWARA NARIHARA (Poet and Painter)

AMUSEMENTS

The pastimes of Court society in these years differed not so much in
kind as in degree from those of the Nara epoch. In amusement, as in
all else, there was extravagance and elaboration. What has already
been said of the passion for literature would lead us to expect to
find in the period an extreme development of the couplet-tournament
(uta awase) which had had a certain vogue in the Nara epoch and was
now a furore at Court. The Emperor Koko and other Emperors in the
first half of the Heian epoch gave splendid verse-making parties,
when the palace was richly decorated, often with beautiful flowers.
In this earlier part of the period the gentlemen and ladies of the
Court were separated, sitting on opposite sides of the room in which
the party was held. Later in the Heian epoch the composition of love
letters was a favorite competitive amusement, and although canons of
elegant phraseology were implicitly followed, the actual contents of
these fictitious letters were frankly indecent.

Other literary pastimes were: "incense-comparing," a combination of
poetical dilletantism and skill in recognizing the fragrance of
different kinds of incense burned separately or in different
combinations; supplying famous stanzas of which only a word or so was
given; making riddles in verse; writing verse or drawing pictures on
fans,--testing literary and artistic skill; and making up lists of
related ideographs. The love of flowers w