Of such character was the battle fought on the bank of the Koromo River, late in the eleventh century.  The eastern army routed, its leader, Sadato, took to flight.  When the pursuing general pressed him hard and called aloud—­“It is a disgrace for a warrior to show his back to the enemy,” Sadato reined his horse; upon this the conquering chief shouted an impromptu verse—­

    “Torn into shreds is the warp of the cloth” (koromo).

Scarcely had the words escaped his lips when the defeated warrior, undismayed, completed the couplet—­

    “Since age has worn its threads by use.”

Yoshiie, whose bow had all the while been bent, suddenly unstrung it and turned away, leaving his prospective victim to do as he pleased.  When asked the reason of his strange behavior, he replied that he could not bear to put to shame one who had kept his presence of mind while hotly pursued by his enemy.

The sorrow which overtook Antony and Octavius at the death of Brutus, has been the general experience of brave men.  Kenshin, who fought for fourteen years with Shingen, when he heard of the latter’s death, wept aloud at the loss of “the best of enemies.”  It was this same Kenshin who had set a noble example for all time, in his treatment of Shingen, whose provinces lay in a mountainous region quite away from the sea, and who had consequently depended upon the H[=o]j[=o] provinces of the Tokaido for salt.  The H[=o]j[=o] prince wishing to weaken him, although not openly at war with him, had cut off from Shingen all traffic in this important article.  Kenshin, hearing of his enemy’s dilemma and able to obtain his salt from the coast of his own dominions, wrote Shingen that in his opinion the H[=o]j[=o] lord had committed a very mean act, and that although he (Kenshin) was at war with him (Shingen) he had ordered his subjects to furnish him with plenty of salt—­adding, “I do not fight with salt, but with the sword,” affording more than a parallel to the words of Camillus, “We Romans do not fight with gold, but with iron.”  Nietzsche spoke for the samurai heart when he wrote, “You are to be proud of your enemy; then, the success of your enemy is your success also.”  Indeed valor and honor alike required that we should own as enemies in war only such as prove worthy of being friends in peace.  When valor attains this height, it becomes akin to

BENEVOLENCE, THE FEELING OF DISTRESS,

love, magnanimity, affection for others, sympathy and pity, which were ever recognized to be supreme virtues, the highest of all the attributes of the human soul.  Benevolence was deemed a princely virtue in a twofold sense;—­princely among the manifold attributes of a noble spirit; princely as particularly befitting a princely profession.  We needed no Shakespeare to feel—­though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to express it—­that mercy became a monarch