The gifted Mr. Rhodes was probably in doubt as to the humor of this passage because it is not prefixed with “Our friend K---- sends the ‘Drawer’ the following good one,” and because its point is not indicated by italics after the fashion of humor of the _Ayer’s Almanac_ school; but he can rest assured that that brief quotation from Murger is the funniest thing in his essay, always excepting his own bovine lack of perception. It is particularly funny to me because I have sometimes witnessed the “entry and promenade” through the salons of the witty authors of stories that have been accepted by magazines--a spectacle calculated to produce prolonged and hilarious merriment--and I have often wished that the recitation clause in the Bohemian’s program could be enforced in every house in the town. I have devoted a good deal of space to this long-forgotten article because it is a fair sample of the sort of stuff that is offered to us from time to time, prepared especially for us, like so much baby’s food, by men and women who are carefully selected by the magazine barons, and who generally rival Mr. Rhodes in point of simian incompetence and utter lack of all appreciative or perceptive qualities. But let us turn from the awful spectacle of Mr. Rhodes standing like a lone penguin in the very midst of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and wailing mournfully about the poor girl who “sometimes compels the young man to marry her.” A far brighter picture is that presented by the distinguished English gentleman who, having won the highest distinction with his pencil, takes up his pen with the air of one who is enjoying a holiday fairly earned by a lifetime of toil, and portrays the real Quartier Latin of the Second Empire with a humor that makes us think of Henri Murger, and with a delicacy of touch, a human sympathy, and a tendency to turn aside and moralize that place him very near to Thackeray. If you wish to read a story which is at once human, truthful, and interesting, read George Du Maurier’s “Trilby,” and note the skill with which he has caught the very essence of the spirit of student life, preserved it for a third of a century, and then given it to us in all its freshness, and with the fire of an artistic youth blended with the philosophy and worldly knowledge that belong only to later life. To read “Trilby” is to open a box in which some rare perfume has been kept for thirty odd years, and to drink in the fragrance that is as pervading and strong and exquisite as ever.