It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s _Posters_ for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a mediocre poster for _The Pseudonym Library_, a woman in a street opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest _Poster_ he ever designed--a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in black and purple, for _Christmas Books_--all three of _The Yellow Book_ phase. * * * * * There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s life--an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by. I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance--and it was a regret to me that it so chanced--it fell to my lot to have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for it, ’tis true--had clamoured for it--and yet resented others saying what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of Wilde--I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitled _The Decay of English Art_, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken