d reached her zenith of talent and
luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the
world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin,"
while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon
Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists
who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of
their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_,
and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were
inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the
painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, Francois Millet, in
poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing
"The Sowers" and "The Angelus."

Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of
Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle
it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's.
Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however
lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers.
However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty
to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.

It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that
ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the
moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for
itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of
Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of
Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of
his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented
exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit,
which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and
Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He
could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves
of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in
praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the
originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.

It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert
Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands,
Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the
same age