Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career--a fact that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley has noticed--was the very brief period of the public interest in him. Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound--with _The Yellow Book_; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the last number of _The Savoy_ he had vanished from the public eye almost as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his doings; and his failure to keep the public interest with _The Savoy_, and all its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what new books he was producing. The _Book of Fifty Drawings_ seemed to have written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better cause to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to continue _The Savoy_ in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; but Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture--it had all ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the public homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper cutting” had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called _The Peacock_, to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of _The Savoy_; and had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beardsley’s flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the name of _The Peacock_ to _Books and Pictures_, which sounded commonplace enough to make _The Peacock_ appear quite good when otherwise it seemed somewhat pointless. [Illustration: INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”]