The republic of Bohemia in general had all the follies and virtues, the amiability and brutality of youth. It was generous, noisy, more often hungry than drunk, often on the verge of despair, and always fantastically clothed. It sprang up in Paris as rapidly as the iron shanties of a Canadian township round a proposed extension of the railway. The settlers, self-assured, fervid, rise on a tide of increasing prosperity till some supreme moment when their venture, its markets humming, its saloons crowded, its new town hall nearly built, seems the very embodiment of all their hopes. But if the railway, after all, take another route, the glory gradually dwindles, the workers throw down the tools, and the host of speculators melts away, till only that population is left which the soil will actually support, and what was for a day a city resumes the existence of an ordinary village. Bohemia's history is of a less commercial texture, but of a like pattern, as I have already said. Its rise was swift, it had a brilliant apogee, its decline was gradual. In a posthumous poem by Philothée O'Neddy, whose place in the chronicles of Bohemia will be duly recorded, it is said: _Il est depuis longtemps avéré que nous sommes,_ _Dans le siècle, six milles jeunes hommes_ _Qui du démon de l'Art nous croyant tourmentés,_ _Dépensons notre vie en excentricités;_ _Qui, du fatal Byron copiant des allures,_ _De solennels manteaux drapons nos encolures._ These six thousand copies of the "Fatal Byron," if they ever existed, have, for the most part, died without leaving their names to posterity. The historian can deal only with a few individuals, who embodied the salient qualities of Bohemia. VII THE SECOND "CÉNACLE"