. Even Elia's
wanderings on paper are more apparent than real, and there is a method in
his quaintest fantasies. His discursive essays are arabesques observing
geometrical patterns, and though seemingly careless, follow out cunningly
preconceived designs. He only appears to digress; but all his bypaths
lead back into the high road. Hazlitt, on the other hand, was a genuine
digressionalist; so was De Quincey; so was Borrow. There is all the
difference between their literary mosaic and the arabesques of Lamb. And
should one still doubt how to classify Elia, one could scarcely place him
among the "Children of the Open Air." Make what allowance you like for
his whimsical remarks about the country, it is certain that no passion
for the Earth possessed him.

One characteristic, however, both the Bohemian and the Vagabond have in
common--that is, restlessness. And although there is a restlessness
which is the outcome of superabundant nervous energy--the restlessness of
Dickens in his earlier years, for instance--yet it must be regarded as,
for the most part, a pathological sign. One of the legacies of the
Industrial Revolution has been the neurotic strain which it has
bequeathed to our countrymen. The stress of life upon the nervous system
in this era of commercialism has produced a spirit of feverish unrest
which, permeating society generally, has visited a few souls with special
intensity. It has never been summed up better than by Ruskin, when, in
one of his scornful flashes, he declared that our two objects in life
were: whatever we have, to get more; and wherever we are, to go somewhere
else. Nervous instability is very marked in the case of Hazlitt and De
Quincey; and there was a strain of morbidity in Borrow, Jefferies, and
Stevenson.

Far more pronounced in its neurotic character is Modern Bohemianism--as I
prefer to call the "town Vagabond." The decadent movement in literature
has produced many interesting artistic figures, but they lack the grit
and the sanity of outlook which undoubtedly marks the Vagabond. In
France to-day morbidity and Vagabondage are inseparable.

Gallic Vagabonds, such as Verlaine and Baudelaire, interesting as they
are to men of letters and students of psychology, do not engage our
affections as do the English Vagabonds. We do not take kindly to their
personalities. It is like passing through the hot streets after inhaling
the scent of the woodland. There is something stiflin