that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.” In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of bitter regret was at hand. * * * * * Beardsley during his early _Yellow Book_ phase, about the July of 1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for _The Comedy Ballet of Marionettes_ which appeared in the July _Yellow Book_; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, _The Comedy Ballet No. 1_, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a _Lady with a Mouse_ on the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said--“I only use flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.” [Illustration: THE SCARLET PASTORALE] It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint _The Comedy Ballet I_ in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement for Geraudel’s Pastilles--as well as I can remember--which first appeared in _Le Courier Français_ on February 17th, 1895. It was a wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact, Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men in that realm--Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec, and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was essentially “in the small.”