of the Clodhoppers' Freehold Land Society;
of the Ragged School Bank of Deposit; of the
Machine-Sawing Lucifer Match Company;
of the Lodging House Keepers' Protection
Society; of the Beer Shop Keepers'
Guarantee Society; of the Cigar-end Saving
Company; in the list of directors of each and all
of these incorporations, between Goldworthy
Nugget, Quartz Lodge, Holloway, and Major
Bangles, H. E. I. C. S., you will find the Lord
Kay Plantagenet Montmorency Say, M. P.,
F. R. S. How F. R. S.? how M. P.? yet both;
but how, Bohemia alone can tell. Lord Kay
Say, as a fourth son, would have starved or
sunk into some commercial mésalliance. As a
director he thrives, and wondrously so. If
you call upon your friend Gatters, secretary
to the Costermongers', or Ratters, actuary to
the Costermongers', it is ten to one but you
will find a smart little brougham at the door,
and that one of the clerks in the outer-office
tells you that you must really wait ten
minutes, for that Mr. Gatters or Mr. Ratters
is engaged with my Lord.

If any man doubt the existence of the
province I may call Upper Bohemia, let him
wait till the next railway mania, the next
assurance mania, the next mining mania, the
next gold-finding mania, the next emigration
mania. Let him consider the scores of well-
educated, well-dressed men, with chains, and
rings, and whiskers, ay, and moustaches, and
tufts, who start up, and are immediately
converted into directors, secretaries, provisional
committee-men, speculators, stags—what you
will. How have they lived during the interim?
how will they live when the mania is
over? Yet I can hear the wheels of their
broughams rattling yet, and they dine, and
drink, and wear chains and rings, and are
jovially Bohemian, mania or no mania.

If I could drive some hundreds of the
well-dressed units of what is called society into
the pens of Smithfield market, and then have
some Asmodeus at my bidding to untile, not
the roofs of the houses, but the heads of the
assembly, and read their working brains,
what a well-informed man I should be to be
sure! In a moment would be made manifest
the history of Captain Brown's commission,
and Jack Fortinbrass's secret mission from
the republic of Guatemala. I should know
what Ricochet really does in the city; whether
O'Ryan's "esteets in Ireland" have actually
any existence; how Mrs. Doublefacet pays for
her dinner-parties; where Corneyguide gets
his jewellery from; how many hundreds a
year Tom Dummy clears at whist, and to
what particular morning journal Captain
Cobb, who writes for the papers, is attached.
Perhaps the most startling and instructive
revelation of all would be to know where all
the well-dressed inhabitants of Bohemia
live. They swagger about Regent Street,
they sit next us at dinner, they are at our
evening parties, at the club, the theatre,
but where do they live? Perhaps in
Belgravia, perhaps in back streets off Leicester
Square, or Clare market. Perhaps I know,
but while I tell of the chief features of
Bohemia, scorn to uncover the nakedness
of the land.

With all due deference to M. Henry
Murger, whose admirable book, Les
Bohémiens de Paris, has suggested this desultory
article, I cannot help thinking that the
Bohemianism most pregnant with matter for
reflection and astonishment is that of the
conventionally termed upper classes, not that
of painters, and poets, and musicians, and
journalists. It is comparatively easy to
understand how young Tibbets the artist—
who has not been able to get a picture
accepted by the Academy yet, who has no
connection, even among picture-dealers, no
patrons, no friends, save artists and authors
as poor as he himself is, very little credit with
his artist's colourman, and still less with his
landlady—is ofttimes put to strange shifts
and hardships, and when he does receive a
little money, spends it very quickly, for the
sheer novelty of the thing, wandering about
in the intervals of a windfall in a strangely-
vagabondising and Bohemian manner. We
can understand Tibbets, so we can Jack
Midriff, the medical student, and Frank
Readiscrip, who is writing for the Penny
Voice of Freedom till he can get an engagement
on the Times. But, for mystery and
subtlety of ways and means, and fertility of
invention, commend me to Upper Bohemia.
The struggling poet, painter, student, have
little if any appearance to keep up. Long
hair, and a threadbare coat, are rather
picturesque than otherwise. They involve
no evening parties, no boxes at the opera, no
broughams in the park. In the higher
spheres only are these Napoleons of
Bohemianism to be found. They dash by you, all
glittering and splendid, and while your friend
Jones whispers, "hasn't a penny in the world,"
Tompkins admiringly sibillates, "lives at the
rate of a thousand a year." It may be in
days to come that if I have power and you
inclination, I will treat of that Bohemia
which lies at the very bottom of the social
ladder—down among the straw and the mud,
and which alone can be the parallel to the
Bohemia I have attempted cursorily to
describe.

   NEW TALE by Mr. CHARLES DICKENS now
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