The Press.
London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

I
1262 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 25,1858.

yittraturt.

Memoirs of William Beckford, of Fonthill, Author
of " Vathelt." Two Vols. London : Skeet.
THE department of Biography probably includes
some of the best and worst that has ever appeared
under the name of literature. And there is one
singular fact connected with it, that it has not,
generally speaking, shared in the improvement by
which most kinds of writing have been affected.
The execution of poetry—whatever may be the
value of the ideas it embodies—is, at the present
day, usually respectable ; often, indeed, of cloying
smoothness. Cho no longer appears down at
heel, but is often splendid, or at least ornate,
with the sinus of her robe full of curious things,
the result of patient research. Little compilers
imitate the blaze of Macaulay or the coruscation
of Carlyle, and, at any rate, do their best. And
the standard of scientific and philosophical pro-
duction is constantly advancing, and both research
and originality are (le rigueur in all that relates
to Mind or Nature. But Biography, if it has a
zenith, when measured by the Lives of Schiller,
Goethe, or Arnold, has also a nadir of terrible
profundity—a Malebolge of bookmaking, where
the hack and the compiler wallow in wild confu-
sion, without ever seeming to catch even a re-
flected ray of better light from the greater
masters of their art. Yet such is the curiosity
we all feel about our neighbour's affairs, that
such books are doubtless good speculations, and
will probably continue to be so. We all like
gossip about private tastes and habits, anecdotes
of strange people and celebrated places, and
even if they are ill told it matters little.
And there may be a total want of perception of
character or judiciousness of moral estimation—
but then the reader is flattered by thinking he
can supply this for himself, and the greater is his
credit if he can do so with scanty or ill-arranged
materials. So Biographies, of a certain sort, are
produced out of Malebolge with unremitting
assiduity, and are read, it seems, by a much-
enduring public.
In the lamentable crew which shoots them forth,
the author of the volumes before us must, we
fear, be reckoned as one of the worst offenders.
Of qualifications for his task he possesses but
one,—that of having some indifferently Amod
materials to work with. In all else he is sadly to
seek. His style is as bad as bad can be; always
trivial and vulgar, and frequently ungrammatical.
He has taken the furorbiographicus in its most viru.
lent form, and thinks it incumbent on him to adopt
all his hero's tastes and dislikes, and to imply
that all he did not care for was not worth having.
He treats the peculiar subject of his reputation
with marked disingenuousness, and, to fill his
pages, extracts or abridges in the coolest fashion
vast quantities of Beckfbrd's published works.
What he says ex penu suo is trashy and inconse-
quent, and the only readable parts of his volumes
are the portions of which Mr. Redding—not
himself a model of style—and other " indivi-
duals," as he calls them, have permitted him to
avail himself. But the life of Beckford was
worth writing, and as, possibly, those better quali-
fied might have I -1 reasons fir disliking the task,
we ought perhaps to feel grateful to a writer
who has rushed in and unveiled the treasures of
the pre-Adamnite sultans and their singular
master to the gaze of a generation which had
begun to forget all about him.
But we must utter a protest, in limine, against
the first two chapters of the book. One, entirely
filled with names and dates, gives the supposed
Beckford pedigree, including collateral branches,
in its full extent; another is equally copious on
the doings and sayings of the celebrated Lord
Mayor. The biographer tries to connect his
hero's ancestors with the Conquest. There is a
village near Tewkesbury called Beckford, and
there were Beckfords in the reign of Henry VI.
" After which," says this ingenious genealogist,
`• there is a blank of '217 years in the history of
" the family to be supplied, . . if it be the
" mute family." With equal naivete he takes up
the family again only in the person of Peter
Beckford, who in 1702 was lieutenant-governor
of Jamaica, and died in 1710, leaving behind
him two sons, Peter and Thomas. It is possible,
however, to go a little higher than this. Mr.
Jeaffreson, in his " Novels and Novelists," tells
us that the first known progenitor of the race

was a tailor at Maidenhead in the early part of
the seventeenth century. He had two sons,
Thomas and Peter. Thomas became Sheriff of
London, was knighted, and married a baronet's
sister. All we hear of Peter is, that he had a
son who entered the army, and made judicious
presents to Pepys, the diarist. This son was the
lieutenant-governor above mentioned, and great
grandfather of the author of " Vathek."
We subjoin the pedigree in a note.* The
fifteen pages devoted to an enumeration of the
Beckford family, lineals and collaterals, are most
clumsily put together. At p. 4 we are told that
" Peter Beckford, the son who had become
" Speaker of the House of Assembly, died in
" 1735, having married Bathsua, daughter of
" Colonel J. Hering, who died in 1750, and
"he [who ?] left issue, Charles, Priscilla, and
" Elizabeth." Six lines further, it is stated that
" Peter Beckford, the above Speaker, &c., had
" thirteen children." Again, at p. 15 the writer
says, " It will now be proper to return to Wil-
" Liam Beckford the elder, of Fonthill, second
" son, awl Speaker of the Jamaica House of
" Assembly "—while, a few lines below, he tells
us that William Beckford " was sent from
" Jamaica to England at the age of fourteen."
Seventy pages of Vol. I. bring us to the death
of Alderman Beckford, several of whose speeches
—including the famous one to George 111.,
which he probably did not deliver—and even
the toasts he proposed at a ten-thousand-pound
dinner at the Mansion .house in 1770, are given
in extenso. This remarkable man, who, the
writer tells us, in spite of his " multifarious
duties," was not " without finding time for mo-
" derate dissipation," had several natural chil-
dren, to whom he was rich enough to give
5,000/. apiece. That all their names are not
"abstracted in chief," as lawyers say, is a fortu-
nate circumstance, to which not the "will," we
suspect, but the " poverty " of the present writer
has consented.

William Beckford the younger was born at
Foothill on the 29th September, 1759, and was
educated there by a Dr. Lettice, whose instruc-
tions were of the ordinary classical character.
Between twelve and sixteen he seems to have
gone through with his tutor the principal Greek
and Latin classics, but, except that his quickness
was above the average and his memory good, we
do not find that he showed any signs of especial
precocity. Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttleton
were consulted about his education, and it was
probably by the advice of the former that the
study and practice of English declamation formed
a part of it. Young Beckford, while staying at
Burton Pynsent, the great orator's residence,
repeated a speech he had translated from Thucy-
dides, with so much success that Lord Chatham
rose, embraced him, and Exclaimed, turning to
young William Pitt, " May you, my son, some
" day make as brilliant a speaker !"—Beck-
ford's least praiseworthy leanings, as his
friends thought, were his inordinate taste for
"blood," and his fondness for Oriental literature.
The nobility of his ancestry on the side of his
mother, who was of the Abercorn branch of the
Hamilton family, turned his mind to genealogical
matters, and he attempted to trace his ancestry
on one side or other up to John of Gaunt !—the
only ground for this absurd notion being that his
father had bought a castle once the property of
" time-honoued Lancaster." It does not appear
to have struck the biographer that, if there had
been the slightest truth in the suggestion that
the Beckfords of Jamaica could be connected
with the family who flourished near Tewkesbury
before the Conquest, or even with the Sir Richard
Beckford who fought at Bosworth Field, their
presumed descendant would have been sure to
have discovered it.—His addiction to Eastern
fiction was disapproved by Lord Chatham, who
did not think a deep acquaintance with the Ara-
bian Nights a good training for a Liberal M.P. ;
but Beckford's tastes were anything but classical,

• Bock/ord (the tailor)

and it was useless to try and make them so • h
fastened with avidity on all allusions in travels'e
then
or elsewhere which brought before him the sta
ionfa thi otsn ,
expectedvi s ions
fortune whose splendourposstpossibly
vi.sh.magn. magnificence of the countries which occupied
Iv:stall:sags
inspired him with a hope of realizing.
Ile was doubtless a brilliant youth, with good
looks, a fair share of solid information, and a
more than ordinary share of accomplishments
and knowledge of society; but he was spoiled,
conceited, and petulant. While visiting the Duke
l
and Duchess of Queensberry in his tenth year he
received a lesson the repetition of which would
have done him no harm. He had been rather
sarcastic about some of her grace's peculiarities of
etiquette. His octogenarian hostess--seated
probably in her beehive straw-chair,—sent
for the family Bible and made him read a
passage from the Book of Wisdom :—" There it
" was, young man," said she, when he had
finished, " that I learned my manners : 1 hope
" you will remember what you have read."
Mrs. Beckford was prejudiced against Oxford
and Cambridge, and sent her son at seventeen to
finish his education in the house of a relative at
Geneva, under the care of his tutor.—Before
this time, however, his satiric ability had begun
to display itself, if we are to believe what
he told Mr. Cyrus Redding, that his "Biogra-
phical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters"
was composed at the age of seventeen. The book
was not, at any rate, published till his nine-
teenth year, after his return from the Continent.
It is difficult not to imagine that Dr. Lettice, who
furnished his pupil with a copy of verses for the
album of the Grande Chartreuse, had alsm some
hand in the first work he gave to the public. Tim
idea, of course, was originally suggested at home.
The old housekeeper at Fonthill resembled, it
would seem, the stately personage who glides in
black silk through the apartments of a certain
lordly scat in Sussex, and informs visitors from
adjacent watering places that this or that group
of banditti "is by Salvolatile Rosica: "—She
was far to seek in her knowledge of ancient
masters, and her mistakes suggested to Beckford
an elaboration of them on a very extended scale,
which he is said to have presented to her as a
handbook-. But the lives of Waterzouchy of
Amsterdam,' Og of Basan,' and Sucrewasser of
Vienna,' are surely well enough known to have
enabled the present biographer to have dispensed
with the thirty odd pages which he has devoted
to an abridgment of them, with copious extracts.
But this is not the last specimen we shall meet
with of his genius for book-making.
At Geneva, or in exclusions in the neighbour-
hood, young Beckford made the acquaintance of
De Saussure, Bonnet. lluber, and Voltaire,—the
latter, then eighty-four years of age, "a very
" dark-complexioned, shrivelled, thin old man,
" stooping much from age," but with remarkably
large and penetrating eyes. What his young visitor
thought of him we are not informed. The former
does not seem to have taken very kindly to the
company of the savans. The society at the baths
of Evian, where the company met every morning
at seven to drink the waters and dance to music
in the open air, was much more in his way, and
scenery, in which he always delighted, furnished
him with more congenial topics fbr the " Dreams,
Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, in a Series of
Letters from Various Parts of Europe," which he
subsequently published in 1783.
In a year and a half he returned home, and
before setting out on the regular "grand tour"
travelled through various parts of England—
making a sort of progress from one country-house
to another, "enchanted" when the mansion was
venerable, and "exhibiting that proud scornful
" lip which to the last he slowed when indicating
" contempt for anything," when it was too
modern to please. The ideas which found then
subsequent expression in the splendour of Font-
hill may be traced in embryo during this journey
—where we find that the three things which
delighted him most were Sir C. Fynte's baronial
hall at Hazel!, Lord Courtenay's tower in Powder-
ham-park, and the ruins of Furness Abbey.

Tho.nas Peter
Peter (Limit:Goy., d. 1710)

In 1780 he set out on the tour of Europe,—
visited Holland, Belgium, the Rhine, the Danubt.
Munich, the Tyrol, Venice, Bologna, and the
rest of the Italian cities. At Naples he met witb
the first Lady Hamilton—not the syren who In
vented the shawl dance and fascinated Nelson,—
but a lady of pure mind," who died in 1782.

Peter (Speaker, rd. 1735; Tho:nas
illiam (I.d. Myr. of Ludn., 4.1770)
Wtm.ram (4. 1814)