Man's nature is erotic to its very foundations; he was erotic, in infancy, in his own way; he carries within him all the erotic instincts of millions of ancestors for thousands of years back. His eroticism extends to many sensitive areas of his body like his lips, the palms of his hands, his chest and back. Eroticism often is hidden in an interest in many subjects which are apparently unrelated to it, an interest which is a compensation to one for his lack of love. Man's first real combined physical and spiritual suffering commences at puberty when he hears new and strange voices in his soul calling for a reply to which there is no answer. He discovers that society is so constituted that he must spend his youth, when the passions are at their height, in unnaturally curbing or misdirecting them. He often discovers later that even marriage is not a full satisfaction for his love instincts. Though man has refused to concede the importance that the erotic has played in his life, his fellow men who were poets spoke for him. They did not conceal the truth, for the words in which their emotions were couched betrayed them. Often the people persecuted their spokesman for uttering the truth, though they delighted in secretly reading his books. The "purist" to-day is often the one who revels (in private) most in obscene literature; while many people find in such literature the only means they have of indulging their ungratified love life. Many book-sellers make a specialty of furnishing pornographic books and pictures to many roués and celibates. The mere interest, however, in a virile and unhypocritical literary work like a novel by Fielding or Smollett, does not indicate abnormal eroticism in the reader. In fact, it is often a sign of some unhealthy tendency or starvation in human nature when a person shrinks from honest and frank literature. The school-boy or college student who reads in stealth De Foe's novel _Roxana_, instead of _Robinson Crusoe_, who turns from his Greek version of Aristophanes to the translation of _Lysistrata_, or who wearies of Chaucer's Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_ and tries to read in spite of the old English "The Miller's Tale" or "The Reeve's Tale," is not an immoral youngster. The reader who not having read these works may look them up (now that they have been mentioned) is not therefore an indecent or abnormal person. The school-boy's as well as the reader's interest is each additional proof of the erotic in us. The real lover of literature who has read most of the Latin poets, English dramatists and French novels is soon in the position where the "erotic" portions do not assume for him the vast importance they have for the reader who merely hunts them out and takes no interest in any other passages but these. Bayle, whose _Dictionary_ abounds in many risqué stories, defended himself in an excellent essay called "Explanation Concerning Obscenities." He said there very aptly: