Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 April 1884 — Latter-Day Bohemians. [ARTICLE]

Latter-Day Bohemians.

It was a great crowd that hung around Pfaaff’s, in the days when the famous humorist, Charley Browne, was delivering his 100 lectures at Dodworth Hall. Josh Billings used to go there then, when he was only a poor auctioneer. But Josh was not a Bohemian by sympathy—he was too saving for that. Bret Harte, Bailey, the Danbury News man, Griswold, and the celebrated humorist, Leonard, hung out there. Charley Brown was at one time a Cleveland journalist, but the proprietor of Vanity Fair took him to New York, paying him SI,BOO a year. When Vanity Fair died at the end of eighteen months, “Artemus Ward” Swore that he killed it with his ghastly humor, for Browne was a humorist of no mean merit, and w&s something of a Bohemian, and a remarkably brilliant one in conversation. Of the Bohemians of to-day, volumes may be written. Some of the finest work on the metropolitan press comes from their caustic pens. New York has Bohemians who, when they have passed away, will leave a. lustrous fame. Chicago has its Bohemia, and many of the cleverest productions that grace the pages of the great dailies there are the work of the guild. There are but one or two Bohemians in Detroit, but many in St. Louis and New Orleans, and more in Washing’ton and Paris. London, however, is Bohemia par excellence of the world, for the best writers on the press there, and the most brilliant critics and poets, are all of Bohemia.— George M. Grummond, in St. Louis Magazine.