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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text
Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ... shows that they deemed it worthy of their best artistic power. SUPERSTITIONS AND DEMONOLOGY. 155 If it be desired therefore to form a correct judgment as to the amount of fancy and imaginative power which the Japanese display in their artistic work, we must go Fig. 74 to the collections of mystic figures and illustrations of their superstitions, including their demonology. Many of the latter series represent human figures with wings and clawlike feet, and often a proboscis-like elongation of the nasal organ, with which they play all kinds of games and tricks. Fig. 71 may serve as examples. We shall come to other illustrations of these, wild fancies in metal and in ivory, for they never seem tired of producing them in every possible form and material. Fig. 72 (p. 153) represents some vision of a water-sprite or aerial visitant, who is throwing the spectator into wild excitement by her apparition. Fig-73 is something of a similar kind, but differently treated. It represents, I believe, a tomb at which a husband has been praying, and the spirit of his wife appears to console him for her loss, and prove her satisfaction at such evidence of constancy. Fig. 74 is the same subject reversed. Here it is the wife that is constant, and the departed husband visits his disconsolate widow. The next (Fig. 75) introduces us to something less benevolent. A pilgrim husband, it may be, visiting the tomb of a lost wife, finds her over his head, and in anything but an amiable mood. She has a most diabolic leer, and her hands look very like claws ready to tear his flesh. As Mr. Walton says in his lecture on the Asiatic Origin and Mythological Meaning of many of our Popular Stories, in which he speaks of the peculiar ideas about the dead prevalent...
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