much of his intensity of admiration. The higher the æsthetic culture, however, the less as a rule (not always) is this force operative, and therefore directly in the interests of chastity the answer may be made to Stöckl’s challenge, that an artist may experience a purely æsthetic enjoyment of form in the nude figure which is hardly possible to the uncultivated person. It is hardly necessary to dilate on the influence of the instinct in question in the sphere of painting. Here, too, it is more evident to the average man, with his naïve enjoyment of materiality, than to the connoisseur. Andrée tells us that many tribes of men cherish indecent pictures and statues which have no religious symbolism, and we all know how common is the habit of drawing such things on fences and walls. But more significant than such grossness is the popular preference for sentimentally suggestive pictures. The passionate admiration of some neuropathic persons for the flat illustrations of a fashion paper is but a pathological exaggeration and distortion of the amazing popularity of some insipid, wide-eyed, simpering feminine figure, and the almost worse blond hero of many so-called artists. It is not necessary to call names, but a student of psychological æsthetics should not shrink from stating _sine ira_ the true (though often unconscious) grounds for the admiration bestowed on such things, nor ignore its significance. While music comes in the province of our inquiry only when the accompanying words, situation, and explanations, or the subjective temper of the hearer lends to the tone movements a sexual meaning,[522] poetry, on the contrary, as has been said, plays a very large part in the business of love, and even more so among civilized than among primitive people. Besides love lyrics, which have been sufficiently illustrated, there are narrative descriptions of love scenes and processes—not only the numerous poetic lucubrations which deserve to be designated as erotic, which means in plain English indecent, but the whole immeasurable sea of novels and romances whose leading interest depends on this theme. Many can read such tales only in their youth (boys are especially liable to this passion for romance immediately after the subsidence to their attack of Indian tales), but the majority retain their capacity for inward sympathy with the trials of lovers; and here, too, the taste of the general public is as opposed to that of connoisseurs as in the case of pictures. The ability to cater to this taste is possessed pre-eminently by women, because the false idealism which abounds in such works accompanies a certain ignorance of the facts of life which women retain oftener and longer than men. The study of some of the better class of these romances—notably those of E. Marlitt—is not without psychological interest. One of our comic papers not long since quoted this passage, ostensibly from a novel: “In an adjoining room sounded a bearded masculine voice”; and the