Japan and the Japanese

178 JAPAN. A. D. 1C13 1C20.
positively refused to receive a present from the viceroy of New
Spain, or to see the persons who brought it.
At the commencement of the new reign, there were yet con-
cealed within the empire thirty-three Jesuits, sixteen friars of the
three orders, and seven secular priests, who still continued to min-
ister to the faithful with the aid of a great number of unlive
catechists. Seven Jesuits and all the friars but one were in Nagasaki
and its environs. Of the other Jesuits, several resided in the
other imperial cities where they still found protectors, while the
rest travelled from place to place as their services were needed.
Those at Nagasaki were disguised as Portuguese merchants, who
were still allowed full liberty to trade; while those in the provinces
adopted the shaven crowns and long robes, the ordinary guise of
the native bonzes. After a while some of them even ventured to
resume the habits of their order, and to preach in public; but this
only drew out from the emperor a new and more formal and precise
edict. It was accompanied with terrible menaces, such as
frightened into apostasy many converts who had hitherto stood out,
and even drove some of them, in order to secure favor for them-
selves, to betray the missionaries, who knew no longer whom to
trust.
The missionaries sent home lamentable accounts of their own
sufferings and those of their converts, and all Catholic Europe
resounded with lamentations over this sudden destruction of what
had long been considered one of the most flourishing and encouraging
provinces of missionary labor, not unmingled, however, with
exultations over the courage and firmness of the martyrs.*
* Lopo dc Vega, the poet, who he-Id the office of procurator fiscal to the apoa
tolic chamber of the archbishopric of Toledo, celebrated the constancy of the
Japanese martyrs, in a pamphlet entitled, Triumpho de la Fe en los Rryno* ilcl
Japan, pi* los annonie 1014 and IGlo, published in 1C17. " Take away from
this work," says Charlevoix, " the Latin and Spanish versos, the quotations
foreign to the subject, and the flourish of the style, and there will IM* nothing
left of it." The subject was much more satisfactorily treated by Nicholas Tri-
gault, himself a very distinguished member of the Chinese mission, which he
had joined in 1010. He returned to Europe in 1816, travelling on foot through
Persia, Arabia and Egypt, to obtain a fresh supply of laborers. Besides an
account of the Jesuit mission to China (from which, next to Murco Polo'*
travels, Europe gathered ita first distinct notions of that empire), and a sum-