I open at random, the pages of _Confessions of a Young Man_ where there is a reference to the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_, Place Pigalle; where the writer confesses more of himself than on any other page of his book. I am a student of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets and alcoves. I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude,--study, as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me, the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate _Roses of Midnight._ I turn from those sentences to Casanova, whose _Memoirs_ are one of the most wonderful autobiographies in the world; who, always passionate after sensations, confesses, in his confessions, the most shameless things that have ever been written: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. He was, as he professes, always in love--at least, with something. Being of origin Venetian and Spanish, he had none of the cold blooded libertinism of Valmont in _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos. Baudelaire, in two of his sweeping Paradoxes, said of this book: "_Ce livre, s'il brûle, ne peut brûler qu'à la manière de la glace. Tous les livres sont immoraux._" Casanova, himself, is the primitive type of the Immoralist, in certain senses of the abnormal Immoralist. His latest reincarnation is an André Gide's _L'Immoraliste_; a book perverse and unpassionate. Now, let us return to the modern writer's Confessions. Whether Moore has read the whole of Casanova or not, there are curiously similar touches in both these writers; as, for instance, in the word "alcoves, streets, ballrooms." Instead of the modern "barrooms" use the word _cafés._ One essential difference is that Casanova had a passion for books: the more essential one is, that Casanova was born to be a vagabond and a Wanderer over almost the whole of Europe, that he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth, and that he had sinned with all his body--leaving, naturally, the soul out of the question.