as Aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the English artists Rowlandson and James Gillray were in some of their fantasies. Virgil dying wanted to destroy his Æneids, and Beardsley _in articulo mortis_ wrote ‘to destroy all copies of _Lysistrata_ and bawdy drawings.’ Yet he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded mysteriously into places like Charing Cross Road. Even Fuchs in his _Erotische Kunst_ has to say: ‘Beardsley is specially to be noticed for the refinement of his conceptions, his ultra-modern culture, his taste, his sense of proportion, his maturity of execution. No harsh or discordant notes, no violent tones. On the contrary, a wheedling finesse. In some respects he is the “maladive” beauty of our time incarnate.’ Beardsley, indeed, never descended to the horrors of an Alfred Kubin or to the tone of certain of Bayros’s designs. He was neither immoral nor moral, but unmoral like Rassenfosse or any one else who has not a fixed ethical theory to teach. In his Juvenal drawings (1897), his five Lucian sketches (1894), and the _Lysistrata_ (1896) he went straight to the great gifts of classical literature, and in touching classical things he took on the ancient outlook via, I believe, those wonderful Greek vase designers[6] which he, so assiduous a haunter of the British Museum, must have not only seen, but revelled in. But of these the best and freest are the _Lysistrata_ conceptions; and to enjoy these one needs an initiation that is not every man’s to receive. [6] Ross says in his _Aubrey Beardsley_, p. 45, one of the events which contributed ‘to give Beardsley a fresh impetus and stimulate his method of expression’ about the _Salomé_ time was ‘a series of visits to the collection of Greek vases in the British Museum (prompted by an essay of Mr. D. S. MacColl).’ We are, however, more interested here with the literary side of his work, which divides itself into poetry and prose. As a poet Beardsley has been accused of over-cleverness. Whatever that criticism means I do not know. Probably it implies some similar reflection to the statement that a dandy is over-dressed. I cannot, however, discover any such affectation in, for example, that charming poem, _The Three Musicians_, which recounts how the soprano ‘lightly frocked,’ the slim boy who dies ‘for réclame and recall at Paris,’ and the Polish pianist, pleased with their thoughts, their breakfast, and the summer day, wend their way ‘along the path that skirts the wood’: The Polish genius lags behind, And, with some poppies in his hand, Picks out the strings and wood and wind Of an imaginary band. Enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.