s' food. I heartily wish success to
his efforts.

[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson

signed: Yours very sincerely,

Grant Allen.]

_'PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHETICS' AND 'PHILISTIA'_

BY GRANT ALLEN

The story of my first book is a good deal mixed, and, like many other
stories, cannot be fully understood without some previous allusion to
what historians call 'the causes which led to it.' For my first book was
not my first novel, and it is the latter, I take it, not the former,
that an expectant world, as represented by the readers of this volume,
is anxious to hear about. I first blossomed into print with
'Physiological AEsthetics' in 1877--the title alone will be enough for
most people--and it was not till seven years later that I wrote and
published my earliest long work of fiction, which I called 'Philistia.'
I wasn't born a novelist, I was only made one. Philosophy and science
were the first loves of my youth. I dropped into romance as many men
drop into drink, or opium-eating, or other bad practices, not of native
perversity, but by pure force of circumstances. And this is how fate (or
an enterprising publisher) turned me from an innocent and impecunious
naturalist into a devotee of the muse of shilling shockers.

When I left Oxford in 1870, with a decent degree and nothing much else
in particular to brag about, I took perforce to that refuge of the
destitute, the trade of schoolmaster. To teach Latin and Greek verse at
Brighton College, Cheltenham College, Reading Grammar School,
successively, was the extremely uncongenial task imposed upon me by the
chances of the universe. But in 1873, Providence, disguised as the
Colonial Office, sent me out in charge of a new Government College at
Spanish Town, Jamaica. I had always been psychological, and in the space
and leisure of the lazy Tropics I began to excogitate by slow degrees
various expansive works on the science of mind, the greater number of
which still remain unwritten. Returning to England in '76 I found myself
out of work, and so committed to paper some of my views on the origin of
the higher pleasure we derive from natural or artistic products; and I
called my book 'Physiological AEsthetics.' It was not my very first
attempt at literature; already I had produced about a hundred or more
magazine articles on various philosophical and scientific subjects,
every one of which I sent to the editors of leading reviews, and every
one of which was p