manner without a thought for "conservatoire" or national opera-house, to go a-sailing on the lake of dreams, without calculating the benefit it may be to your pocket, and dive for pearls of fancy without reckoning their market value. But civilisation sets too just a value upon the benefits of tradition and discipline to tolerate this nomad contempt of their advantages; and in no country are these advantages more highly prized than in France, the land of revolution and unrest. Even the follies of the Latin Quarter, as long as they lasted, were rigidly based upon the traditions of that wild spot. La Vie de Bohème, for all its apparent recklessness of rowdy students and Mimi Pinsons and Lisettes, had its traditions in vice and virtue, deviation from which was regarded an infraction as intolerable as ever could be deviation from those of the five Academies or the Comédie Française. The student in the process of going to the dogs was bound to go thither in the way of the Quarter. He inherited from a long line of genius his hat and his garments, the cut of his hair and beard, his sins and attitudes. The road of pleasure and pain, of wickedness and repentance, of distraction and despair, was cut out for him upon tradition as unswervable as that of the most respectable institution, and to act the proper part assigned him in the triumph of disreputableness he should take Villon for his model, or wring out the sombre folds of the
