Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F. Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes most of its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged with his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form and furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever to Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was confined to smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and gold leaf. It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square upright shafts of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief impression of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages the Japs make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent Whistler may have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple Menpes’s word for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it “should be as simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler and Wilde’s war against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of the crowded Victorian drawing-room brought in a barren bare type of room to usurp it which touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in preciousness, in dreariness, and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s blue and gold-leaf scheme, carried out all over this pretentious room, may have done to better its state, at least it must have rid it of the brown melancholy of the stamped Spanish leather which Whistler found so “stunning to paint upon.” It is probable that this contraption of pseudo-Japanese art, to which the rare genius of Whistler was degraded, did impress the youthful Beardsley in this his imitative stage of development, owing to its wide publicity. The hideous slender straight wooden uprights of the furnishments of which the whole thing largely consisted, were indeed to be adopted by Beardsley as the basis of his drawings of furniture a year or two afterwards, as we shall see. But in some atonement, the superb peacock shutters by Whistler also left their influence on the sensitive brain of the younger man--those peacocks that were to bring forth a marked advance in Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of years later when he was to give his _Salome_ to the world. It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father--as quickly to vanish again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking and he and his “pater” alone in the house. Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he edited a little magazine called _The Bee_; and it was in the November of 1891 that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his _Hamlet_ in which he at once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.