er usual edifying manner.

Young Beckford's education was continued for a year and a half at Geneva.
He then travelled in Italy and the Low Countries, and it was at this time
that he amused himself by writing, at the age of about twenty-two,
"Vathek" in French, at a single sitting; but he gave his mind to it and
the sitting lasted three days and two nights. An English version of it
was made by a stranger, and published without permission in 1784.
Beckford himself published his tale at Paris and Lausanne in 1787, one
year after the death of a wife to whom he had been three years married,
and who left him with two daughters.

Beckford went to Portugal and Spain; returned to France, and was present
at the storming of the Bastille. He was often abroad; he bought Gibbon's
library at Lausanne, and shut himself up with it for a time, having a
notion of reading it through. He was occasionally in Parliament, but did
not care for that kind of amusement. He wrote pieces of less enduring
interest than "Vathek," including two burlesques upon the sentimental
novel of his time. In 1796 he settled down at Fonthill, and began to
spend there abundantly on building and rebuilding. Perhaps he thought of
Vathek's tower when he employed workmen day and night to build a tower
for himself three hundred feet high, and set them to begin it again when
it fell down. He is said to have spent upon Fonthill a quarter of a
million, living there in much seclusion during the last twenty years of
his life. He died in 1844.

The happy thought of this William Beckford's life was "Vathek." It is a
story that paints neither man nor outward nature as they are, but
reproduces with happy vivacity the luxuriant imagery and wild incidents
of an Arabian tale. There is a ghost of a moral in the story of a
sensual Caliph going to the bad, as represented by his final introduction
to the Halls of Eblis. But the enjoyment given by the book reflects the
real enjoyment that the author had in writing it--enjoyment great enough
to cause it to be written at a heat, in one long sitting, without
flagging power. Young and lively, he delivered himself up to a free run
of fancy, revelled in the piled-up enormities of the Wicked Mother, who
had not brought up Vathek properly, and certainly wrote some parts of his
nightmare tale as merrily as if he were designing matter for a pantomime.

Whoever, in reading "Vathek," takes it altogether seriously, does not
read it a