Next year, 1893, finds these influences modified to a certain extent, although the _Salomé_ drawings still belong to that cadaverous, lean and hungry world of Burne-Jones, from which Beardsley has not completely as yet rescued himself by means of Frenchmen like Constantin Guys; but his release has well arrived in 1894 with his design ‘The Fat Woman,’ a caricature of Mrs. Whistler. Watteau, Rops, and the Japanese, and the thousand books he is now reading throw open at last all the splendour of the art world to him. He lacks nothing, and he goes forward borrowing lavishly, like Shakespeare, from any source that suits him. Beardsley’s illustrations are generally critical decorations, although it must never be forgotten he did attempt on more than one occasion a series of illustration pure and simple in, for example, his early scenes for _Manon Lescaut_, _La Dame aux Camélias_, and _Madame Bovary_, which are not altogether successful. He is perhaps at his best as the illustrating critic, which he is somewhat scornfully in _Salomé_, very happily in Pope’s _The Rape of the Lock_, and triumphantly in Aristophanes’ _Lysistrata_. It can be said of his work, rather sweepingly no doubt, but still truthfully, he began by decorating books with his _Le Morte d’Arthur_; he then tried illustrating them; but wound up in criticising them by his decorations. ‘Have you noticed,’ he once wrote to Father Gray, ‘have you noticed that no book ever gets well illustrated once it becomes a classic? Contemporary illustrations are the only ones of any value or interest.’ But Beardsley was always more than a mere illustrator, for where a learned Editor writes notes and annotations on Aristophanes, he decorates him; where Arthur Symons would write an essay on _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, Beardsley does a number of critical designs. It was, in fact, an age of the critical function; but Beardsley’s criticism is of that supreme kind Oscar Wilde called ‘creative criticism.’