A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, _M. A. P._, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden, Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at Walton-on-Naze....” You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world his footstool--no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a good friend as well as a publisher.” Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public. There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his novel entitled in its bowdlerised form _Under the Hill_, and later to illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication. * * * * *