are properly attributes of youth, the real illuminant--Murger's Bohemia is laid bare as a merely economic state. The true Bohemians, he says, are known upon the literary and artistic market-place, where their wares are saleable, but at moderate prices; "their existence each day is a work of genius"--"preceded by a pack of ruses, poaching in all the industries connected with the arts, they hunt from morn till eve that ferocious animal which is called the five-franc piece." To Murger, who wrote of what he knew, the man who had the means to live a stable existence, howsoever retired, was a fool if he remained in Bohemia: to the inhabitants of _la Bohème galante_ it was the not being entirely destitute which made their life peculiarly worth living. If Colline ever speculated with any profundity he may have seen that his friends and he lived really in a prison of which poverty, prodigality, and idleness were warders. The Bohemia of Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Houssaye had all the glory of a voluntary protest, a passionate assertion of liberty, a revivifying of life in accordance with new artistic ideas. The difference is not simply one of degree. The brotherhood of the Impasse du Doyenné were less destitute and more talented than Rodolphe and his friends, but that is not a point that at this moment requires stress. The important fact is that in a few years Bohemia had undergone a great change; that, whereas a few years after 1830 young men with a little money and some talent deliberately chose to make their life more picturesque than that of ordinary citizens and to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of commerce and officialdom, a few years after 1840 the ideal of struggling artists was to become as soon as possible successful merchants and to escape from the possibility of that picturesqueness which they welcomed as an alleviation of a state of transitory discomfort. It would be quite beside the mark to regard Bohemia as guilty in this of self-degradation; so far, indeed, as the change was conscious, the majority of mankind must logically find it praiseworthy, for all human effort is judged by its tendency to well-being. The change, however, was none of Bohemia's doing, but was due mainly to the fact that art was beginning, in the modern sense, to pay. The beginnings were small, but they were quite evident, especially in the increased profits from journalism and illustration. The old Bohemia of the golden age rested on the supposition that the artist worked primarily to please himself, and that money, source of enjoyment as it was, remained a secondary consideration. The supposition, in the first forward rush of commercial prosperity, was bound to become untenable. Writers and artists of obvious talent were too valuable commercial assets to be left to their careless selves; they had to be tempted into the cage--an easy task, for, if money be regarded as a means of more enjoyment, why should a Bohemian resist it? It was