Privat d'Anglemont, who eventually died of consumption, did little more than carry on the traditions of the "noctambules," less mischievously than their founder, Rétif de la Bretonne, less modestly and artistically than Gérard de Nerval, but so much more seriously than either of his predecessors that he left little scope for a new departure to his own successor, Alfred Delvau. He was not, in the truest sense, a Bohemian, though he led an existence ever bordering on the confines of Bohemia. The same may be said, in a more transitory sense, of Flaubert, the great renovator and refiner of Romanticism. Most of his life was spent in the country, but there was a short period when he came to study law in Paris, which, if it were not mentioned, might justify a challenge from readers familiar with "L'Education Sentimentale" or Maxime du Camp's "Souvenirs Littéraires." So far as the first of these books is concerned, little time need here be spent in finding relevant points of comparison. The last thing which Flaubert desired to portray in that depressing picture was an existence in any sense artistic. His hero is a provincial youth who, during his student days in Paris, drifts aimlessly and indolently through a variety of second-rate experiences in company with second-rate friends. Flaubert's own experiences are, no doubt, frequently worked into the material, but "L'Education Sentimentale" is nothing so cheap as autobiography served in a thin sauce of fiction. It is a novel in which the author has with the highest exercise of penetrative imagination treated what Mr. Henry James would call the "germ"--the dreary wastefulness, that is, of such a life in case of such a young man as Frédéric Moreau, who with Madame Bovary is Flaubert's contribution to the pathology of _le mal romantique_. Flaubert himself, with all his excitability and extravagance, was of a much stronger stamp; the strength of his artistic conviction saved him from all such flabbiness. He came to Paris to study law, but, having failed to pass his examination, returned to his home in 1843. If he had stayed he might easily have become one of the leading figures, certainly a powerful influence, in that Bohemia which Murger knew. Maxime du Camp, who made his acquaintance early in 1843, shows him as a young man living always at a high pitch with the flamboyant vitality that would have done no dishonour to the Impasse du Doyenné, so far was he from being the victim of Frédéric's weak-kneed desolation. He passed his days in an alternation of prodigality and poverty, spending fifty francs on his dinner one day and feeding on a crust and a slab of chocolate the next. He lived in a kind of intellectual tornado, both frantic and noisy. He went into ecstasies over mediocre works in which he perceived beauties hidden from the rest of the world, but which he loved to point out stridently to his friends, intoning the prose, roaring the verse at the