or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any case, the mediocre _Black Cape_ and the better Georgian _Toilette_, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd. [Illustration: THE STOMACH DANCE _from “Salome”_] The interpolated _Black Cape_ and the _Second Toilette_ we may here dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they are wholly outside the _Salome_ atmosphere. Of the pure _Salome_ designs, incomparably the finest are _The Stomach Dance_ and the _Peacock Skirt_. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he considered the best drawings to be _The Man in the Moon_, the _Peacock Skirt_, and _The Dancer’s Reward_--it should be noted by the way that Beardsley showed by his _Book of Fifty Drawings_ that his title was _The Man in the Moon_ not as the publishers have it, _The Woman in the Moon_. But it is in _The Climax_, one of the less noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride--for though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design, drawn but a year before and shown in _The Studio_ first number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown.