all of us pleasure.

To books of this class I should be disposed to add that of the
Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, a distinguished Japanese priest, scholar, and
traveller, who wrote a book entitled _Three Years in Tibet_. It must
not be supposed that the Shramana is a simple or unsophisticated
writer, or that he has not studied literary effects; but his
intentional effects have the charm of _naivete_ to an English reader,
and his narrative is wholly unstudied in respect of all that delights
us in it.

Such a book as this makes us distrustful of all our standards. It is
an example of art as unconscious as that of the song of some vain, but
for the moment solitary, child. It declares to us that Nature, when we
can bring to it our own appreciation, is the first thing, and that the
idealism of art is the second-best with which we content ourselves
when Nature, with its direct appeal, is in abeyance.

The Shramana accomplished a journey which has few parallels in the
history of travel. He spent three years residing and travelling in the
uplands of Tibet, after the exclusion of strangers had become a
rigorous policy, and before the British punitive expedition had
inspired fear of the long-handed foreigner. He had with him no
organised escort of men and mules such as accompanied Sir Sven Hedin
in his more recent and better advertised expedition. He went alone and
in disguise, as Burton went on his pilgrimage to Mecca; on intimate
terms with the natives as Mr. Doughty was with the Arabs; a mendicant
as Arminius Vambery has been in Asiatic Turkey and Persia. And he had
an advantage which none of these travellers had, one which he did not
scruple to use to the utmost--he was a Buddhist, like the Tibetans,
and not only a Buddhist, but an exceptionally learned priest,
possessed of a knowledge of things holy which he used with a religious
fervour tempered with Odysseian guile. He was no missionary, but he
carried the true Buddhism about with him in Tibet as discreetly as
Borrow carried his Bibles in Spain; and his style has a curious
resemblance to that of our English gipsy. With everyone whom he meets
he converses on religion, philology, love, or the stars, in the gayest
argumentative manner, and these dialogues come as interludes to
adventures as thrilling as any that ever fall to the lot of man. In a
few paragraphs he will dwell on the almost inconceivable perils he
experienced from mountains, floods, storms, and famine, and in the