Here Marmaduke White was born, and bred, and was, in due season, to die. All attempts to coax him to cleaner and cosier quarters were unavailing. Although one by one his fellow-Bohemians fell away, corrupted by the heresy of respectability and clean linen; although those who were born in the same quarter with him listened to the new commercial culte and became prosperous men of business; although Jones the novelist drove his brougham and frequented genteel parties, while Brown the painter wore fine raiment, sold his pictures for splendid prices, and put up at a fashionable club, White still remained as he had been--impecunious, irresponsible, generally out-at-elbow. It was his constant complaint that the old landmarks were fast changing. ‘If I live long enough,’ he said, ‘I shall stand on the ruins of the last chop-house and see the last night-house turned into a temperance hotel. The downfall of Bohemia dates from the day when Thackeray became famous, smoked cigars, and built that nice house at Kensington. It is the apotheosis of the Snob. Even at the Garrick, where one used to meet all the talent, the Snob is rampant. There is not a _foyer_ of the old kind in all London. The literary man has become a commercial gent the artist is a spiritualised bagman--even the actor wears fine clothes and goes to swell garden-parties. _Sic transit gloria Bohemio!_ I begin to feel like a man who has endured beyond his due time; a sort of Wandering Jew, the old clothes-man of an extinct existence and a perished creed. I should not so much care if people were much better for the change--but they are not. Fellows are valued now, not for what they are, but for what they earn. The very journals are grown brazen-fronted and rave of Mammon. A great book is a book that makes a great deal of money; a great artist is one who earns a great sum. At my time of life I can’t, set up as a swell, I like my glass of good beer, and my pipe, and my shirt sleeves. When I die my epitaph will be “Et ille in Bohemia fuit”--and I suppose I shall be the last of the race.’