Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, though how exactly he fitted the red hair “_a la Bretonne_” to his theory of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the wearer, would require more than a little guesswork. The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it came to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a marked personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely proud of him. But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding farewell and leaving for London, straightway to become a clerk in an architect’s office. At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his “puerilia”--or what the writers generally call his “juvenilia,” but these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant, inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the “Pied Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing of _Holywell Street_. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him a month or two false--it is difficult to see why Beardsley should have made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London that he had not yet learnt to frequent--but even granting that the _Holywell Street_ was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley to his schoolfellow a month or two later, in the _Holywell Street_ (1888) there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley leaves his school and his “puerilia” cease--he enters at once on a groping attempt to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his ideas and impressions. So far, of promise there has been not a tittle--one searches the “puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign--but there is none. In the _Holywell Street_ there _is_ the sign--and a portent. It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, tragi-comic wayfaring. [Illustration: HOLYWELL STREET] III YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK” At sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk in the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an Insurance office.