It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the decorations he wanted for the _Morte d’Arthur_ in the young fellow’s first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end of the year of 1892, to which half year the _Morte d’Arthur_ almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as search the book that the _Morte d’Arthur_ was never completed--we find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once--but Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration. There appeared in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for June 1893, drawn in April 1893, as the first _Studio_ number was appearing, a design known as _The Neophyte_, or to give its full affected name, “_Of a Neophyte, and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel_”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called _The Kiss of Judas_--both drawings reveal an unmistakable change in handling, and the _Neophyte_ a remarkable firmness of andform, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed. Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the _Morte d’Arthur_ and kindred works in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through it--it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities. [Illustration: “OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED UNTO HIM”] It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a handling as _The Neophyte_. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious to the lay mind a little further on.