Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his debt to Greece through Anning Bell. We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s _Evelina_ and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for Hawthorne’s _Tales_ and Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_. Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written “after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance masterpieces rose-leafwise from the _Rape of the Lock_ and _The Savoy_ for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once--we are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the more a marvel--almost a miracle. It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the decoration of the _Morte d’Arthur_ with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds drawn, and London asleep--poured them forth in that secret atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley worked--he was everywhere--but for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that art.