In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete list of drawings for the _Volpone_,” suggested its being made a companion volume to _The Rape of the Lock_, and asked Smithers to announce it in _The Athenæum_. Besides the now famous and beautiful _Cover_, he planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of _Volpone_ to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did execute are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He reveals that the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus, _Volpone and his treasure_, but that is to be in line and wash--obviously in the style of _The Lady and the Monkey_--yet strangely enough, the remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”! And it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Prospectus in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate and line version of the _Frontispiece_--and that it is not to appear in the book. We have the line drawing for the _Prospectus_--and we can only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated in the manner of _The Lady and the Monkey_ or the _Initials_. That, in this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling in face of the fact that the _Initials_ were in the new method, line with pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month, that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything he had yet done, which the _Initials_ certainly were. On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” sending the _Cover Design for Volpone_ and the _Design for the Prospectus of Volpone_, begging for proofs, especially of the _Design for the Prospectus_, “on various papers at once.” Smithers sent the proofs of the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for Beardsley’s Christmas cheer. The beautiful _Miniature_ edition of _The_ _Rape of the Lock_, with Beardsley’s special _Cover-design in gold on scarlet_, had just been published--the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley called them.