on record, when Beardsley first showed these last designs to him he ‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. And then he said slowly, “Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake, you are a very great artist.” And the boy burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “I mean it--I mean it.”’ In reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in the _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For example, the true Beardsley type of woman appears in the design entitled ‘How Queen Guenever made her a Nun.’ These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first invented by the artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of a French bagnio and a Chinese visitor. As Pierre Caume demanded of Félicien Rops we are moved to ask of Beardsley: Quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes pâlies? Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté Met des reflets d’absinthe en leurs melancolies? They belong to the same world as the women of Toulouse Lautrec, Rops, Odélon Redon, Bayros, and Rassenfosse--the type known as _la loupeuse insatiable et cupide_. They move and have their being in French erotica and novels like _La Faustine_. Beardsley had now (1896) reached his best period with _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes, and of the two the palm should be awarded to the eight designs of the latter work. No one has yet dared to say that these are probably his masterpieces; but some day, when the kinship between Beardsley and those old Greek Masters who designed their exquisite vases and wine cups is established, this truism may also come to light. It is unlikely, however, to become revealed until Aristophanes himself is fully translated in the vulgar tongue, for not even the most generous Editor in his monumental edition has essayed that impertinence to Mrs. Grundy. The illustrations or rather critical decorations of Beardsley are also not likely to become generally circulated to all because of their frankness. For phallism is purely pornographic if it has nothing to do with your subject. But unfortunately it is a considerable factor in the _Lysistrata_, as every scholar knows. Beardsley himself in his letters lays considerable emphasis on the fact that he was illustrating Aristophanes and not Donnay’s French version of the same. And never was he more cynical or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect; never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully ridiculed. In all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of the third, though I have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity. He had learned too much from the men who designed the old Hellenic pottery to be obscene. He was frank as Chaucer is frank, not vicious