As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power to fulfil--even had he had the will--for “the written word remains,” and, printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven: Jesus is our Lord & Judge Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy--all obscene drawings. Aubrey Beardsley. In my death agony. But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter repentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist lashing the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made no such claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He faced the stern facts of his own committing; and almost with the last words he wrote he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a marvellous achievement--and he did so without stooping to any attempt at palliation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the truth--and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on to base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius might have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort as he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes--indeed, almost before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew full well Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication owing to their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship. On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years and seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked body was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity. The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death, together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to the end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was music.” So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road that winds from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like the way of the Cross--it was long and steep and we walked.” They laid him to rest in a grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, a sepulchre with an arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they who took their last walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The Lord.” Hail and Farewell! [Illustration: AVE ATQVE VALE] A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE PUERILIA Mid-1888 he comes to town