So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking--to mimic the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval woodcut and--to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the public--Lewis C. Hind. * * * * * Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of _Bon Mots_ by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the _Bon Mots_ he made no pretence of illustration--the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But the severe conditions and limitations of the _Morte d’Arthur_ page held Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were the finest education in art that he ever went through--for he taught himself craftsmanship as he went in the _Morte d’Arthur_. It made him. One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for the _Bon Mots_ to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black decorations of the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ put upon Beardsley for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career depended on those designs for the _Morte d’Arthur_, and he strove to reach his full powers in making them.