ble, but he made young Murger give him six of
the eight dollars earned. The rest of his salary was spent among the
boxes of books which line the parapet of the Paris quays,--a sort of
literary Morgue or dead-house, where the still-born and deceased
children of the press are exhibited, to challenge the pity of
passers-by, and so escape the corner grocer and the neighboring
trunk-maker. Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could
discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in
buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on
which it was printed, he replied, that a poet should keep himself
informed of the progress of Art. He has since confessed that his object
in buying this trash was simply to compare his efforts with those which
had been deemed worthy to see print. His ambition then was to be pale,
consumptive, to drink the dregs of poverty's poisoned chalice, and to
toss on a hospital-bed. He found it hard work to gratify these desires.
His plethoric person, his rubicund cheeks and high health, gave him much
more the appearance of a jovial monk of Bolton Abbey than of a Werther
or a Chatterton or a Lara. But as he was determined to look the poet of
the Byron school, for a fortnight he followed a regimen "which would
have given phthisis to Mount Atlas"; he studied in some medical treatise
the symptoms of the consumption, and, after wading through thirty miles
of the mud and mire to be found in the environs of Paris, drenched to
the skin by an autumnal rain, he went to the hospital and was admitted.
He was delighted. He instantly wrote an ode to "Hallowed Misery," dated
from the "House of Woe," sent it off to the Atlantic Monthly of Paris,
and lay in bed dreaming he should find himself famous next morning, and
receive the visits of all Paris, from Monsieur Guizot, then
Prime-Minister, to the most callous poetaster of the Latin Quarter, and
be besieged by every publisher, armed with bags full of money. He woke
the next morning to find himself in perfect health, and to hear the
physician order him to clear out of the hospital. He had no news from
the magazine nor from Monsieur Guizot.

'Tis ill playing with edge-tools! The hospital is not to be coquetted
with. There is no such thing as romping with misery. One might as well
amuse himself toying with the rattlesnake or playing with fluoric acid.
Wait a moment, and the hospital will reappear in the story of his lif