erusal left an impression
which only genius leaves. Beckford really had invention, and an
extraordinary narrative power. That such faculties, after having once
revealed themselves, should contentedly have remained dormant ever
afterwards, is one of the most curious facts in the history of the
human mind, and it is the more curious that Beckford lived to a very
advanced age.

Beckford's case appears to have been one of those in which great wealth
diminishes or wholly paralyzes the highest energy of the intellect,
leaving the lower energies free to exert less noble kinds of activity. A
refined self-indulgence became the habit of his life, and he developed
simply into a dilettant. Even his love for the fine arts did not rise
above the indulgence of an elegant and cultivated taste. Although he
lived at the very time most favorable to the appearance of a great
critic in architecture and painting, the time of a great architectural
revival and of the growth of a vigorous and independent school of
contemporary art, he exercised no influence beyond that of a wealthy
virtuoso. His love of the beautiful began and ended in simple personal
gratification; it led to no noble labor, to no elevating severity of
discipline. Englishman though he was, he filled his Oriental tower with
masterpieces from Italy and Holland, only to add form and color to the
luxuries of his reverie, behind his gilded lattices.

And when he raised that other tower at Fonthill, and the slaves of the
lamp toiled at it by torchlight to gratify his Oriental impatience, he
exercised no influence upon the confusion of his epoch more durable than
that hundred yards of masonry which sank into a shapeless heap whilst as
yet Azrael spared its author. He to whom Nature and Fortune had been so
prodigal of their gifts, he whom Reynolds painted and Mozart instructed,
who knew the poets of seven literatures, culling their jewels like
flowers in seven enchanted gardens--he to whom the palaces of knowledge
all opened their golden gates even in his earliest youth, to whom were
also given riches and length of days, for whom a thousand craftsmen
toiled in Europe and a thousand slaves beyond the sea,[4]--what has this
gifted mortal left as the testimony of his power, as the trace of his
fourscore years upon the earth? Only the reminiscence of a vague
splendor, like the fast-fading recollection of a cloud that burned at
sunset, and one small gem of intellectual creation that lives