The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age--these drawings, clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the one hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly _Venus between Terminal Gods_, designed for his novel of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, better known as _Under the Hill_, and the exquisite _Mirror of Love_, or as it was also called _Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape of a Mirror_. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past and utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s skill is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician drew subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, rhythm, orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These two masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense of sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom. The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked, gossip whispered and pursed the lip--but gave no clue. He came to London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of questionable morality--a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how--whilst the henchman held the absent-minded seller in converse--Smithers slipped out and resold it for several hundred pounds--and how, the book being bought and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his