The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces--we find silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal, each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In the two drawings of _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Battle of the Beaux and Belles_ it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of the thing. * * * * * By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his state--he was about to learn the dread verdict. The second number of _The Savoy_ appeared in April, as a quarterly, and its charming cover-design of _Choosing the New Hat_ screened a sad falling off in the output of the stricken man--for the number contained but the _Footnote portrait of himself_; the _Third Tableau of “Das Rheingold”_ which he had probably already done before going to Brussels; a scene from _The Rape of the Lock_; and but one illustration to _Under the Hill_, the _Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima_; whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II--in all but four new drawings! Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next--the third--number of The Savoy to appear in July, _the driving of Cupid from the Garden_, and worked upon the poem of the _Ballad of a Barber_, making the wonderful line drawing for it called _The Coiffing_, with a silhouette _cul-de-lampe_ of _Cupid with the gallows_; but his body was rapidly breaking down.