its glory nor increase their own. Paris once had room for Bohemia, but London never. Chelsea and Soho, Highgate and St. John's Wood are to-day no more Bohemian, in the true sense of the word, than Piccadilly or Grosvenor Square. In the lapse of years a few accidental attributes of the real Bohemia have come to be regarded as the essentials of the false. We are fond of labels and catchwords, lightly casting away their implications. So it has come to pass that Bohemia--that dirty, hungry, lazy, noisy vale of youthful laughter and tears, so enchanting in prospect or retrospect, so uncompromising in actuality, which many had to pass through and most would have avoided--is looked on as the pleasant home of more or less artistic natures, that men of stable occupations, regular means, and fastidious temperaments may choose for a dwelling-place, just as they may choose a garden city. Well, let them masquerade, yet Bohemia is dead, and more honour may be done to its memory by recalling how it walked and lived than by casting lots for its old-fashioned garments. Its virtues and its faults were balanced as equally as its good and bad fortunes, but if it were to be revived, the resurrection should begin with that which was its chief glory, the intense artistic enthusiasm that was its charter. "Nous étions ivres du beau," wrote Théophile Gautier. London, indeed, would be the better for the infusion of a more Dionysiac spirit into her æsthetic appreciations and ideals. But that is not of the times. At the end of his charming book, "Les Enfants Perdus du Romantisme," M. Henri Lardanchet quotes a speech made by the president of some university society to the effect that the youth of to-day, preoccupied with extremely definite problems, has no longer the poetic enthusiasm of the past generation, whereon he is moved to exclaim: "Ah! ne vous glorifiez pas de l'avoir chassé, cet enthousiasme! Il était à la fois la rose et la chanson au bord de vos vingt ans désolés; il était l'opulence orgueilleuse de votre âge, il était votre grâce, votre génie, votre fierté, ô jeunesse!--toute votre jeunesse...." Let us take this for the epitaph of _La Bohème_. II A FRINGE OF HISTORY: THE REVOLUTION OF 1830