Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm was the great miniaturist of English letters — a caricaturist and essayist who published his collected works at twenty-four and titled the closing essay “Diminuendo.” He belonged to the 1890s Yellow Book circle that also orbited Oscar Wilde, which is precisely why the two men’s epigrams have been swapped for a century. On this one Beerbohm was scrupulous: he set the sentence in quotation marks and credited it to nobody, because by 1896 it was already common property.