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Beckford partly owing to grave imputations upon his moral character, which, however, in the absence of any avowed accuser or attempt at proof, it is reasonable as well as charitable to regard as rather the consequence of his retirement than the cause. The only recorded external incidents of his existence during this period are the marriages of his two daughters. One became Duchess of Hamilton; the other, who married Colonel Orde without his consent, was never forgiven by him. His expenditure on Fonthill alone for sixteen years is stated by himself at upwards of a quarter of a million. At length he could go on no longer. Extravagance, inattention to his affairs, the depreciation of his West India property, and unfortunate lawsuits, compelled him in 1822 to dispose of Fonthill and the greater part of its contents for 330,000l. to Mr, John Farquhar, a person who, reversing Beckford's history, had accumulated a vast fortune from the humblest beginnings. Beckford's collections were resold by the new owner in the following year, the sale occupying thirty-seven days. The collection was not always favourably criticised. 'It is,' wrote Hazlitt when the public were admitted to view Fonthill, 'a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy shop, an immense museum of all that is most curious and costly, and at the same time most worthless, in the productions of art and nature. Mr. Beckford has undoubtedly shown himself an industrious bijoutier, a prodigious virtuoso, an accomplished patron of unproductive labour, an enthusiastic collector of expensive trifles — the only proof of taste he has shown in this collection is his getting rid of it.' But Beckford always maintained that the Chinese furniture was smuggled in by the auctioneers, and Hazlitt may not have known that the library and the choicest pictures had been saved from the wreck and removed to Lansdowne Terrace, Bath, where, with diminished fortune but free from embarrassment, Beckford applied himself to the creation of a miniature Fonthill. He continued to collect books, pictures, engravings, and beautiful objects in general, with as keen a zest as of yore — 'all agog, all ardour, all intrepidity,' as he wrote to an agent shortly before his death. He sometimes parted with a picture, but never with a book. In 1834 he republished, with considerable omissions, the suppressed letters of 1783, adding those from Spain and Portugal. On 2 May 1844 he died, scarcely manifesting a trace of age, and having been in vigorous health until within a few days of his decease. Eighty thousand pounds yet remained of the hundred thousand a year and a million in hand with which he had commenced life. He was interred by his own wish under the tower he had erected on Lansdowne Hill, and the grounds with which he had surrounded it were given by the Duchess of Hamilton to form a public cemetery for the city of Bath. His library was sold by auction in 1882. A large proportion of the volumes contained copious notes in his handwriting, more frequently evincing whimsical prejudice than discriminating criticism. He left several works in manuscript, including three suppressed episodes of 'Vathek;' 'Liber Veritatis,' comments on the alleged genealogies of English noble families, probably very candid and caustic; and 'Letters upon the Actual State and Leading Characters of several of the Courts of Europe, particularly France, from the beginning of the Revolution to the death of the King. None of these have been published.

Beckford's was, on the whole, a wasted life, in so far as neither his genius nor his fortune yielded what they would have produced to a wiser and a better man. At the same time his celebrity as a remarkable personage would have endured had he never written anything; and as an author he achieved a renown which he probably valued more than literary fame of the first order, the distinction of being the most brilliant amateur in English literature. Hardly any other man has produced such masterpieces with so little effort. 'Vathek' was written at a sitting, and his letters betray no trace of unusual pains. These works are masterpieces nevertheless. European literature has no Oriental fiction which impresses the imagination so powerfully and permanently as 'Vathek.' Portions of the story may be tedious or repulsive, but the whole combines two things most difficult of alliance — the fantastic and the sublime. Beckford's letters display a corresponding versatility and union of seemingly incongruous faculties. He is equally objective and subjective; his pictures, while brilliantly clear in outline, are yet steeped in the rich hues of his own peculiar feeling; he approaches every object from its most picturesque side, and the measure of his eloquence is the interest with which it has actually inspired him. His colouring is magical; he paints nature like Salvator,and courts like Watteau. His other works make us bitterly regret the curse of wealth and idleness which converted a true son of the muses into an eccentric dilettante. As a literary figure Beckford occupies a remarkable position, an incarnation of the spirit of the eighteenth century writing in the yet unrecognised dawn of the nineteenth, flushed