According to Waseda Bungaku, No. 38 (a literary magazine published on 25 April 1893), it is evident that Shōyō Tsubouchi, M. A., had already read Comparative Literature by Macaulay Posnett by that time. But it was not known until today whether Tsubouchi ever made public his opinions on comparative literature. It was in the spring of 1964 that I found a note on “ Comparative Literature ” a lecture given by Tsubouchi, among the miscellaneous old documents in the Library of Waseda University. The note has only the title : “‘Comparative Literature’, A Lecture by Tsubouchi, M. A.”, and it does not say when and by whom the note was taken down. But by tracing back the route by which it was acquired, I found that its writer was a student by the name of Yoshio Kino. His curriculum vitae shows that he entered the English Ordinary Course of Tokyo Semmon Gakko (Tokyo College, the present Waseda University) in October 1889 and completed the course in July 1890，and that in September of the same year, he entered the Literary Department of the same college and graduated from it in July 1893.

　Based on this fact, I concluded that Yoshio Kino attended the lecture on “Comparative Literature” by Tsubouchi sometime between October 1889 and July 1893. The English Ordinary Course of the school was, in fact, a preparatory division for students going on to the College, not a special course. For example, in this course, Tsubouchi lectured on “The English Constitution” by Walter Bagehot，Sanae Takada on “Representative Government” by Mill, and Sakae Tabara on physiology. Hence it may be presumed that Yoshio Kino attended the lecture on “Comparative Literature” by Tsubouchi after entering the Literary Department of the College, that is, between September 1890 and July 1893.

　The curriculum of the College of those days is stated in the old documents of Waseda University, but the titles of lectures are not mentioned in any of the papers. Judging from the curriculum，if “ Comparative Literature” was given, it must have been done in the course under the title of “ The History of English Literature,” given in the second semester of his first year, that is, between February or March 1891 and July 1891, or in the first semester of his second year，between October 1891 and July 1892, under the same title. In the curriculum for the other semesters, we cannot find any subject that was likely to include comparative literature. Therefore, the lecture by Tsubouchi on “Comparative Literature” must have been attended by Yoshio Kino during the above periods.

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　Shoyo Tsubouchi, known as a builder of a milestone in the history of modern Japanese literature, was as greatly concerned with innovation of comic writings as with propounding of realistic theory. In his Essence of the Novel, the first full-length theory of the novel in Japan published in 1885, Tsubouchi expounded what a true comedy should be like, comparing with Dickens’s Pickwick Papers the popular comic novels of the Edo period such as Jippensha Ikku’s Hizakurige(Shanks’s Mare) and Kinga’s Shichihenjin (The Seven Eccentrics). What he found wrong with these novels was their frequent resort to obscenity and scatology as means of provoking laughter. Laughter in literature should not betake itself to such vain vulgarity, but must be such a decent one as endowed with sympathy, kindness, and pity. Here we see that he was resorting as an antidote against what he called “obscene comedy” to the sentimental humor which was represented by Carlyle and flourishing through Dickens and Thackery. But Tsubouchi’s own theory of wit and humour had not been proposed until he wrote an article on the subject three years later than The Essence of the Novel. From every point of view this unfinished article on “The Distinction of Wit and Humour” in The Senmongakkai Zasshi, No. 2 is obviously based upon Sydney Smiths lectures “On Wit and Humour” which were widely read and quoted for a quarter of a century since its posthumous publication in 1850. And this was the first introduction to Japan of the theory of humour based upon incongruity developed ever since Aristotle and represented in England by Coleridge.