ATALANTA--WITH THE HOUND 229 BEARDSLEY’S BOOK-PLATE 231 THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY 235 COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES” 241 ALI BABA IN THE WOOD 245 COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE” 249 INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE” 255 THE DEATH OF PIERROT 261 AVE ATQUE VALE 270 FOREWORD About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in Hampstead Church--the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet, who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by--and there had forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary and artistic world of the ’Nineties. As the congregation came pouring out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping, dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of God’s acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by the loose-limbed lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long white hands, his lean wrists showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who called to him, showing his “tortoise-shell” coloured hair, smoothed down and plastered over his forehead in a “quiff” almost to his eyes--then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; but was mistaken--he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley. _The Yellow Book_ had come upon the town three months gone by. Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a night. He was the talk of the town--was seen everywhere--was at the topmost height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was out he was to be expelled from _The Yellow Book_! As he had come up, so he was to come down--like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out of the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and for some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed young dandy--fling him from _The Yellow Book_--and dim for him the splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight. Within a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was to drop out of the public eye almost as though he had never been.