From The Saturday Review: Review of The Yellow Book

The Yellow Book. Vol. III. London: John Lane. 1894.

With the lapse of time The Yellow Book has not acquired
tone, which is the gift of time. The amateurishness of the
present number is more pronounced than ever. The note is struck
in the extremely flimsy article, “Women— Wives or Mothers,”
with which the hook opens. Miss Ella D’Arcy‘s ” White Magic”
is extremely disappointing to read after her strong and original
contribution of last quarter. Mr. Crackanthorpe‘s “Study in
Sentimentality,” clever though it be, is by no means equal to Mr.
Crackanthorpe’s usual standard. Of the new writers, Miss Nora
Hopper is the most distinguished. “A Song and a Tale” is
charming, and charming in an individual way. There is much
verse, by Mr. William Watson and others, all of which is
decidedly of the ordinary magazine order; and there is one
poem, “The Ballad of a Nun,” by Mr. Davidson, which moves us
as some blossoming of the desert might. Too much waste is
there to be traversed before Mr. Davidson’s rose rejoices the
reader. Mr. Max Beerbohm‘s “Note on George the Fourth” is
not unamusing or wanting in ingenuity, though Mr. Beerbohm
might have refrained from the dreary joke about Waterloo and
the “playing fields of Eton.” The work of the artists calls for
little comment. Mr. Beardsley is as freakish as ever and in pre­
cisely the familiar kind of capriccio: Mr. Wilson Steer’s drawings
are commonplace, and Mr. Sickert’s have no notable quality
but the realism that suggests the camera. Mr. Broughton‘s
“Mantegna “— if it is Mantegna who is represented, which we
doubt—is a drawing of merit, and so is the clever study “From
a Pastel.”