forces of the mind.  On the other hand, immediately after a sound meal, the brain feels massive, but static.  Tea is conducive to a gentle flow of pleasing thoughts, and anyone who has taken Easton’s syrup of the hypophosphites will recall at once the state of cerebral erethrism, of general mental alacrity, that followed on a dose.  Again, champagne (followed perhaps by a soupcon of whisky) leads to a mood essentially humorous and playful, while about three dozen oysters, taken fasting, will in most cases produce a profound and even ominous melancholy.  One might enlarge further upon this topic, on the brutalising influence of beer, the sedative quality of lettuce, the stimulating consequences of curried chicken; but enough has been said to point our argument.  It is, that such facts as this can surely indicate only one conclusion, and that is the entire dependence of literary qualities upon the diet of the writer.

I may remind the reader, in confirmation of this suggestion, of what is perhaps the most widely known fact about Carlyle, that on one memorable occasion he threw his breakfast out of the window.  Why did he throw his breakfast out of the window?  Surely his friends have cherished the story out of no petty love of depreciatory detail?  There are, however, those who would have us believe it was mere childish petulance at a chilly rasher or a hard-boiled egg.  Such a supposition is absurd.  On the other hand, what is more natural than an outburst of righteous indignation at the ruin of some carefully studied climax of feeding?  The thoughtful literary beginner who is not altogether submerged in foolish theories of inspiration and natural genius will, we fancy, see pretty clearly that I am developing what is perhaps after all the fundamental secret of literary art.

To come now to more explicit instructions.  It is imperative, if you wish to write with any power and freshness at all, that you should utterly ruin your digestion.  Any literary person will confirm this statement.  At any cost the thing must be done, even if you have to live on German sausage, onions, and cheese to do it.  So long as you turn all your dietary to flesh and blood you will get no literature out of it.  “We learn in suffering what we teach in song.”  This is why men who live at home with their mothers, or have their elder sisters to see after them, never, by any chance, however great their literary ambition may be, write anything but minor poetry.  They get their meals at regular hours, and done to a turn, and that plays the very devil—­if you will pardon the phrase—­with one’s imagination.