and irresponsible publisher I ever knew.  Who remembers without a kindly feeling the little shop in the Royal Arcade with its tempting shelves; its limited editions of 5000 copies; the shy, infrequent purchaser; the upstairs room where the roar of respectable Bond Street came faintly through the tightly-closed windows; the genial proprietor?  In the closing years of the nineteenth century his silhouette reels (my metaphor is drawn from a Terpsichorean and Caledonian exercise) across an artistic horizon of which the Savoy was the afterglow.  Again, why is Mr. Arthur Symons so precise about forgetting the date of Beardsley’s expulsion from the Yellow Book?  It was in April 1895, April 10th.  A number of poets and writers blackmailed Mr. Lane by threatening to withdraw their own publications unless the Beardsley Body was severed from the Bodley Head.  I am glad to have this opportunity, not only of paying a tribute to the courage of my late friend Smithers, but of defending my other good friend, Mr. John Lane, from the absurd criticism of which he was too long the victim.  He could hardly be expected to wreck a valuable business in the cause of unpopular art.  Quite wrongly Beardsley’s designs had come to be regarded as the pictorial and sympathetic expression of a decadent tendency in English literature.  But if there was any relation thereto, it was that of Juvenal towards Roman Society.  Never was mordant satire more evident.  If Beardsley is carried away in spite of himself by the superb invention of Salome, he never forgets his hatred of its author.  It is characteristic that he hammered beauty from the gold he would have battered into caricature. Salome has survived other criticism and other caricature.  And Mr. Lane once informed an American interviewer that since that April Fool’s Day poetry has ceased to sell altogether.  The bards unconsciously committed suicide; and the Yellow Book perished in the odour of sanctity.

Recommending the perusal of some letters (written by Beardsley to an unnamed friend) published some years ago, Mr. Arthur Symons says:  ’Here, too, we are in the presence of the real thing.’  I venture to doubt this.  I do not doubt Beardsley’s sincerity in the religion he embraced, but his expression of it in the letters.  At least, I hope it was insincere.  The letters left on some of us a disagreeable impression, at least of the recipient.  You wonder if this pietistic friend received a copy of the Lysistrata along with the eulogy of St. Alfonso Liguori and Aphra Behn.  A fescennine temperament is too often allied with religiosity.  It certainly was in Beardsley’s case, but I think the other and stronger side of his character should, in justice to his genius, be insisted upon, as Mr. Arthur Symons insisted upon it.  If we knew that the ill-advised and unnamed friend was the author of certain pseudo-scientific and pornographic works issued in Paris, we should be better able to gauge the unimportance of these letters.  Far more interesting would have been those written to Mr. Joseph Pennell, one of the saner influences; or those to Aubrey Beardsley’s mother and sister.