Max Beerbohm has given us a wonderful personal record of his friend, in which he says: ‘For him, as for the schoolboy whose holidays are near their close, every hour--every minute, even--had its value. His drawings, his compositions in prose and in verse, his reading--these things were not enough to satisfy his strenuous demands on life. He was an accomplished musician, he was a great frequenter of concerts, and seldom when he was in London did he miss a “Wagner night” at Covent Garden. He loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind.... He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.’ In the Domino Room of the Café Royal in London; outside the Brighton Pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, Beardsley was at home and happy. ‘I am really happy,’ he writes, ‘in Paris.’ And it was Beardsley’s chief preoccupation to communicate in his drawings the surprise and delight which this visible world afforded him--a world of strange demi-mondaines and eupeptic stockbrokers, of odd social parasites and gullible idiots. He always had an engaging smile that was delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, Robert Ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom his art was totally unintelligible. After he vacated _The Yellow Book_ art editorship, and _The Savoy_ had been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher. There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had a courage of his own--a courage great enough to issue _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher would look at it. It was Smithers who issued _The Savoy_, the two books of _Fifty Drawings_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Pierrot of the Minute_, the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, and among others the eight ‘Lysistrata’ and the four ‘Juvenal’ drawings. For any one to study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than _A Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1897), and _A Second Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, ‘The Ascension of St. Rose of Lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept into it far too many of his immature _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful method of design. Indeed, the _Salomé_ decorations (1894) had bridged this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of _The Rape of the Lock_ (1896). Whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is