t, and for an obvious reason, of any woman who
shall chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind.
If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even
if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation.

There is a kind of idea abroad that a man must live up to his station,
that his house, his table, and his toilette, shall be in a ratio of
equivalence, and equally imposing to the world. If this is in the Bible,
the passage has eluded my inquiries. If it is not in the Bible, it is
nowhere but in the heart of the fool. Throw aside this fancy. See what
you want, and spend upon that; distinguish what you do not care about,
and spend nothing upon that. There are not many people who can
differentiate wines above a certain and that not at all a high price.
Are you sure you are one of these? Are you sure you prefer cigars at
sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of a farthing? Are you sure you
wish to keep a gig? Do you care about where you sleep, or are you not as
much at your ease in a cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house?
Do you enjoy fine clothes? It is not possible to answer these questions
without a trial; and there is nothing more obvious to my mind, than that
a man who has not experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to
live more cheaply than in his father's house, has still his education to
begin. Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his surprise that
he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour; that the cheap
lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes, the plain table,
have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps give him as keen
pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and
waking, in his former callous and somnambulous submission to wealth.

The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians
of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life. The
Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and prefers
anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most part a
respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living for the
outside, and an adventurer. But the man I mean lives wholly to himself,
does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys what he wants
for himself and not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he
can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You may be
the most