of
more food for the voracious guest. There is thirst: for at one part of
the dream, when Vathek's mother, his wives, and some eunuchs "assiduously
employed themselves in filling bowls of rock crystal, and emulously
presented them to him, it frequently happened that his avidity exceeded
their zeal, insomuch that he would prostrate himself upon the ground to
lap up the water, of which he could never have enough." And the
nightmare incidents of the Arabian tale all culminate in a most terrible
heartburn. Could the conception of Vathek have first come to the son
after a City dinner?

Though a magnificent host, the elder Beckford was no glutton. In the
year of his first Mayoralty, 1763, Beckford, stood by the side of
Alderman Wilkes, attacked for his No. 45 of _The North Briton_. As
champion of the popular cause, when he had been again elected to the
Mayoralty, Beckford, on the 23rd of May, 1770, went up to King George the
Third at the head of the Aldermen and Livery with an address which the
king snubbed with a short answer. Beckford asked leave to reply, and
before His Majesty recovered breath from his astonishment, proceeded to
reply in words that remain graven in gold upon his monument in Guildhall.
Young Beckford, the author of "Vathek," was then a boy not quite eleven
years old, an only son; and he was left three years afterwards, by his
father's death, heir to an income of a hundred thousand a year, with a
million of cash in hand.

During his minority young Beckford's mother, who was a granddaughter of
the sixth Earl of Abercorn, placed him under a private tutor. He was
taught music by Mozart; and the Earl of Chatham, who had been his
father's friend, thought him so fanciful a boy--"all air and fire"--that
he advised his mother to keep the Arabian Nights out of his way. Happily
she could not, for Vathek adds the thousand and second to the thousand
and one tales, with the difference that it joins to wild inventions in
the spirit of the East touches of playful extravagance that could come
only from an English humourist who sometimes laughed at his own tale, and
did not mind turning its comic side to the reader. The younger William
Beckford had been born at his father's seat in Wiltshire, Fonthill Abbey;
and at seventeen amused himself with a caricature "History of
Extraordinary Painters," encouraging the house-keeper of Fonthill to show
the pictures to visitors as works of Og of Basan and other worthies in
h