I doubt if Bohemia was ever so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth, what appeals to the universal human instinct, is the eternal contrast between the dreams and aspirations of youth and the sobrieties of success and middle age. As Jeffery Prowse sang: I dwelt in a city enchanted, And lonely, indeed, was my lot; Two guineas a week, all I wanted, Was certainly all that I got. Well, somehow I found it was plenty, Perhaps you may find it the same, If--_if_ you are just five-and-twenty, With industry, hope, and an aim; Though the latitude's rather uncertain, And the longitude also is vague, The persons I pity who know not the City, The beautiful City of Prague! This Bohemia will never disappear, because every generation of youth reconstructs it afresh, to migrate from it into the world of respectability above or the world of shame below. "Qu'on est bien à vingt ans!" will always be a cry to fill the breast of portly respectability with tender regret. As Thackeray put it in that delightful poem, which is almost an improvement on Béranger: With pensive eyes the little room I view, Where, in my youth, I weathered it so long; With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two, And a light heart still breaking into song; Making a mock of life and all its cares, Rich in the glory of my rising sun, Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs In the brave days when I was twenty-one. What a pity that life is so stern and severe, that for the light morality of Bohemia somebody must pay, some life be wrecked! Nature fills us with youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds. And so the beautiful roselight of Bohemia veils many a tragedy, many a treachery. Yet will the _grisette_ be ever a gracious memory, and literature will always embalm the "Mimi Pinson" of De Musset. She is dead now, _la grisette_, even in Paris, and "hic jacet" may be written over the bonnet she threw _pardessus les moulins_. Ah, Clemence! When I saw thee last Trip down the rue de Seine, And turning, when thy form had pass'd, I said, "We meet again," I dreamed not in that idle glance Thy latest image came, And only left to Memory's trance A shadow and a name.