The publisher, Mr. John Lane, says[8] this much-discussed _Yellow Book_ was founded one morning during half-an-hour’s chat over cigarettes, at the Hogarth Club, by himself, Beardsley, and Henry Harland. While he states that ‘Mr. Harland had the faculty of getting the best from his contributors,’ the publisher goes on to add: ‘Beardsley’s defect as art editor was youth. He would not take himself seriously; as an editor and draughtsman he was almost a practical joker, for one had, so to speak, to place his drawings under a microscope and look at them upside down. This tendency, on the eve of the production of Volume V., during my first visit to the United States, rendered it necessary to omit his work from that volume.’ Looking back on this, all that one can say now is that although Beardsley may have been trying, after all, he and not the publisher was _The Yellow Book_, and with his departure the spirit of the age slowly volatilised from the work until it deteriorated into a kind of dull keepsake of the Bodley Head. There were thirteen numbers in all, and Beardsley actually art-edited the first four. In the charming prospectus for the fifth volume he is still described as art editor, and four Beardsleys were to have appeared in it: ‘Frontispiece to the Chopin Nocturnes,’ ‘Atalanta,’ ‘Black Coffee,’ and the portrait of Miss Letty Lind in ‘An Artist’s Model.’ However, the break came, and Beardsley had no further connection, unfortunately, with the fifth volume. [8] In his pamphlet, _Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book_, p. 1. 1903. The first number, as in the case of so many similar periodicals, was brilliant. The standard set was too high, indeed, to last, and to the staid English literary press of the time it was something of a seven days’ wonder. _The Times_ described its note as a ‘combination of English rowdyism and French lubricity.’ _The Westminster Gazette_ asked for a ‘short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal.’ Above all, the whole rabble descends howling on the art editor. It is Beardsley that annoys them, proving how he stands out at once beyond his comrades. Against the literary editor, Henry Harland, nothing is said; but the press are full of the offences of one Beardsley. As Mr. J. M. Kennedy, in his _English Literature, 1880-1905_, has devoted an admirable, if somewhat scornful, chapter to the contents of _The Yellow Book_, it is to Henry Harland, who seems to have merited all the charming things said about him, that I would now direct attention.