first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually
began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could,
for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters,
it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any
certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even
loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the
fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a
sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never
really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of
ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.
What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not
be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of
respectability. If respectability was your 'bete noire', then you were a
Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,
then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a
sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe
this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic
critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and
I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo
by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came
home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French
accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that
fashion myself, but I had not the courage.

This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that
his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room