Henry Murger is not the least of the witnesses to the truth of a remark--which I owe to one of the critics of my earlier volume--that in England people (he was kind enough to except me) are too apt to accept the contemporary French estimates of French contemporary literature and the traditional French estimates of earlier authors. Murger had, I believe, a hardly earned and too brief popularity in his own country; and though it was a little before my time, I can believe that this overflowed into England. But the posthumous and accepted judgments of him altered _there_ to a sort of slighting patronage; and I remember that when, nearly twenty years after his death, I wrote on him in the _Fortnightly Review_,[284] some surprise at my loftier estimate was expressed _here_. The reasons for this depreciation are not hard to give, and as they form a base for, and indeed really a part of, my critical estimate they may be stated shortly. The "Bohemia"[285] of which Murger was the laureate, both in prose and verse, is a country whose charms have been admitted by some of the greatest, but which no wise person has ever regarded, much less recommended, as providing any city to dwell in; and which has certainly been the scene if not the occasion, not merely of much mischief, which does not particularly concern us, but of much foolishness and bad taste, which partly does. It was almost--not quite--the only theme of Murger's songs and words. And--last and perhaps most dangerous of all--there was the fact that, if not in definite Bohemianism, there was in other respects a good deal in him of a far minor Musset, and both in Bohemianism and other things still more of an inferior Gerard de Nerval. I believe the case _against_ has been fairly stated here. [Sidenote: The _Vie de Boheme_.]