Paoli The Last Of The Missionaries PDF Download

Excerpt from Paoli, the Last of the Missionaries: A Picture of the Overthrow of the Christians in Japan in the Seventeenth Century From October, 1882, until August, 1885, the author's home was in the picturesque city of Nagasaki, on the crest of Higashi-yama, the hill so frequently mentioned in the earlier part of the narrative; and it was while he was standing, one of the summer evenings of 1883, upon the summit of the rocky islet Takaboka, with its awful memories vividly before him, that the idea of telling the story of the fall of the Christians, in the form of an his torical novel, first took shape in his mind. Hencefor ward, his leisure time was spent in visiting the vari ous places associated with the last desperate struggle of the doomed church; in the study of what had already been written upon the subject; and in gathering from the lips of the people legendary accounts of the great rebellion of the jasniu which have been handed down from father to son for more than two and a half centuries. During the course of his investigation, two hitherto unknown manuscripts, written by eye-witnesses of the war concerning which they gave a minutely de tailed account, were brought to light. Upon these the present volume is mainly based, and where the author has deviated from them, it has been to follow what he is convinced is a more truthful account; or, where unessen tial particulars are concerned, to give the novelist an opportunity for reproducing, by the creation of imaginary incidents and characters, the social physiognomy of the age in which the historical personages lived and moved. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.