'Miss and Other Stories: that is all! Ernest Dowson: two slim volumes of verse, half-a-dozen short stories, a collaborator's share in two novels. John Gray: one slim volume of verse. Lionel Johnson: God knows how little. And so on. Arthur Symns has worked on steadily, but, though he is getting on for sixty, you cannot say that his output is immense or contains anything that was not worth doing.
Immensely advertised! Where? And by whom?
Beardsley's output was immense, for his years. Ought not the world to be grateful for it? He told me once that he had an itch for work; and it looked afterwards as if he knew that he was doomed to die at 24 or 26 and wanted to throw off all he could before. When he worked no one knew: no one ever saw him at work and he was always about and always accessible.
He was not conceited. . . . Rickets and Shannon were a little conceited: they had a way of "coming the Pope" over the rest, as Will Rothenstein once put it to me. (Will always took "a proper pride" in his excellent work, but no more). But, Lord, hadn't they the right to be? Was ever a book more beautifully designed than Silverpoints (cover, page, type, typesetting by Ricketts)? Place Ricketts' cover of the Pageant''
