he was educated by a private tutor, the Rev. Dr. Lettice. A public school would have afforded a more salutary discipline; the tutor, though judicious and attentive, could hardly be expected to prevent the spoiled heir to enormous wealth from growing up wilful, extravagant, and capricious. Beckford received musical instruction from Mozart, and for his father's sake was particularly noticed by Chatham, who pronounced him all air and fire,' and solemnly admonished the future author of Vathek' against reading the Arabian Nights.' His precocity and talent for satire were evinced by his History of Extraordinary Painters,' a mystification composed in his seventeenth year in ridicule of the biographies in the Vies des Peintres Flamands,' and to indulge his humour at the expense of the old housekeeper at Fonthill, who is said to have long continued to exhibit her master's pictures as works of Watersouchy, Og of Basan, and other creations of his invention. His mother being strongly prejudiced against the universities, Beckford, accompanied by his tutor, went in 1777 to complete his education at Geneva, and there passed a year and a half. In 1780 and 1782 he visited the Low Countries and Italy. His letters on his travels, together with a description of the Grande Chartreuse dating from 1778, were published anonymously in 1783 under the title of 'Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, in a series of letters from various parts of Europe.' The work, however, was almost immediately destroyed, with the exception of six copies, one of which at least is still in existence, though Mr. Redding seems to imply the contrary. He had already, in 1781 or 1782, written 'Vathek' in French at a single sitting of three days and two nights. An English version, made by a person whom Beckford declared to be unknown to him, but who is understood to have been the Rev. S. Henley, rector of Rendlesham, was published anonymously and surreptitiously in 1784. It is sufficiently idiomatic to have entirely eclipsed and to have frequently been taken for the original, and is accompanied by an erudite commentary, whose value is somewhat impaired by the annotator's ignorance of Arabic. The original appeared at Paris and Lausanne in 1787, the latter edition only bearing the author's name. In 1783 he translated and published the little Oriental tale of Al Ravni;' in the same year he married Lady Margaret Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Aboyne, and lived with her in Switzerland until her death in May 1786. Two daughters were the fruit of this union. In 1787 he sought distraction in a visit to Por

tugal, where his intimacy with the Marquis de Marialva enabled him to acquaint himself with the affairs of the court and kingdom. His Portuguese letters, not published for nearly half a century afterwards, are the most valuable in every point of view that he ever wrote. He extended his tour to Spain, and on his return spent much time in Paris, witnessing the destruction of the Bastille. He was again in Paris in 1791 and 1792, proceeded subsequently to Lausanne, where he bought Gibbon's library, shutting himself up like a hermit to read it, and in 1794 again visited Portugal, where he occupied the retreat at Cintra immortalised in Byron's verse, and wrote his celebrated account of Alcobaça and Batalha. Notwithstanding his incessant absences from his country he was successively M.P. for Wells and Hindon; but he had no taste for public life, and retired in 1794. He was, however, re-elected for Hindon in 1806, and sat until 1820. After his return from Portugal the connoisseur and collector seemed to absorb the author, and he published no more except two burlesques on the sentimental novels of the period, The Elegant Enthusiast' and 'Amezia,' printed in 1796 and 1797. In the former year he settled down at Fonthill Giffard, and launched out upon the course of architectural and artistic extravagance which, combined with his oriental whims and his mysterious seclusion, has given him even more celebrity than he could acquire by his writings. The imaginations of Vathek' seemed to take actual substance, and Coleridge might have beheld the visions of his Kubla Khan with his corporeal eyes. First the old family mansion was rebuilt on a grand scale, then it was pulled down and a yet more sumptuous edifice raised on a different site. The grounds, magnificently laid out and enclosing sunny spots of greenery,' were girdled by a lofty wall to battle intruding tourists and trespassing sportsmen; the costly old furniture was recklessly sold off to make room for new more costly still; a tower three hundred feet high, erected by gangs of workmen labouring day and night, fell from the injudicious haste of construction, and was immediately succeeded by another, which, after Fonthill had passed from Beckford's hands, also tumbled to the ground. Making a hermitage of a palace, Beckford sequestered himself with a physician, a major-domo, and a French abbé, and here, neglectful of his genius, his private affairs, and his responsibilities as a citizen, spent twenty years with few friends or visitors, and apparently with no other object in life than the collection of books and works of art and virtu. This seclusion may have been

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.

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

6

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

by emotions which he does not understand, and depicting the old courtly order of Europe on the eve of its dissolution. His character was patrician in everything but its want of repose and its insensibility to duty; too charitable to be called selfish, attached from caprice to animals, from habit to dependents, he was yet an absolute egotist. It never seemed to occur to him that his magnificent possessions in the West Indies entailed upon him the least responsibility. His misanthropy was mainly affectation, and he was less independent of the opinion of the world than he liked the world to think. Need of human sympathy made him exceedingly kind to very inferior writers who had praised his works; and the few who gained admission to his presence found him a courteous and unassuming gentleman.

[The principal authority for Beckford's life is the memoir by Cyrus Redding, published anonymously in 1859. It is an intolerable piece of book-making, being chiefly made up of extracts from Beckford's own letters, ard repetitions of what the author had previously written in magazines, but is indispensable in the absence of an authorised biography. See also the Gent. Mag., Annual Register, and Athenæum for 1844. The Lockhart's review of his letters in vol. li. of the Quarterly, and an article by O. Tiffany in vol. xc. of the North American Řeview. M. Stephane Mallarmé has reprinted the original French of Vathek (Paris, 1876), and thoroughly investigated the bibliography of the subject. The catalogues of Beckford's Fonthill collections, and of his library, contribute much to the appreciation of his tastes and character. The chapter on his library in Clarke's Repertorium Bibliographicum (1819) is from his own pen. The fullest account of Fonthill is that by Britton (1823), which also contains genealogical and heraldic particulars of the Beckford family.]

most remarkable criticisms on Beckford are

R. G. BECKINGHAM, CHARLES (16991731), poet and dramatist, was born, according to the register of Merchant Taylors' School, on 25 July 1699 (ROBINSON'S Register, ii. 32). His father was a linendraper in Fleet Street. Beckingham was educated at Merchant Taylors' School under Dr. Smith, and is said to have displayed 'great proficiency in his studies,' and given 'the strongest testimonials of extraordinary abilities.' Nothing in his works justifies these eulogies. On 18 Feb. 1718 'Scipio Africanus,' an historical tragedy in the regulation five acts, was produced at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This was followed at the same house on 7 Nov. of the next year by a second work of a similar description, entitled 'Henry IV of France.' The youth of the author, and the presence of a large number of his fellow-students who had

been permitted to visit the theatre, gave some éclat to the production of the earlier work. This, however, is but an average specimen of academic labour. A chief subject of praise in contemporary writers is the manner in which the so-called unities are observed by its author. The plot is founded on a story told by Livy (xxvi. 49-50) and other classical writers concerning the restoration of a beautiful captive by Scipio Africanus to Allucius, a Spaniard. A considerable portion of the play consists of tedious love scenes, which are necessarily fictitious. Quin played Scipio. 'Scipio Africanus' was acted four times in all, two performances being, it is stated, for the author's benefit. It was printed in 12mo in 1718. Henry IV of France' deals with the jealousy of the Prince of Condé of his wife, who is in love with the king, and ends with the murder of Henry by Ravaillac at the instigation of the papal nuncio and the priests. This play was also given four times, Quin appearing as Henry IV. It was printed in 8vo in 1820. In addition to these dramas Beckingham wrote a poem on the death of Rowe, the dramatist; a second entitled 'Christ's Sufferings, translated from the Latin of Rapin,' and dedicated to the Archbishop of York; and other minor poems.

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He died 19 Feb. 1730-31.

[Jacob's Poetical Register; Baker, Reed, and Jones's Biographia Dramatica; Genest's Account of the English Stage.] J. K.

BECKINGHAM, ELIAS DE (d. 1305 ?), judge, was placed on the commission of justices for Middlesex in 1274, but immediately removed. At this time he seems to have held the rank of king's serjeant. He received the commission of justice of assize [for a brief account of the nature and origin of which see under BATESFORD, JOHN DE] in 1276. In 1282-3 he acted as keeper of the rolls of the common pleas, and in 1285 was appointed one of the justices of that bench. In 1289, grave complaints of the maladministration of justice and the venality of the judges being rife, a searching inquiry was instituted, and Beckingham was the only one of the five justices of the common pleas who was not dismissed for corruption. He appears to have continued in the discharge of his duties until 1305, for he was regularly summoned to parliament as a justice between 1288 and 1305. From the fact that he was no longer summoned to parliament after the latter date, it may be inferred that he died or retired before the date when parliament next met. He was interred in the church of Bottisham, in Cambridgeshire, where a monument was dedicated to his memory.

[Dugdale's Chron. Series, 25, 26, 28, 29; Madox's History of the Exch. ii. 7; Rot. Parl. i. 84; Wikes's Chronicon, ed. Gale, 118-121; Holinshed, ii. 491; Parl. Writs, ii. (Index); Orig. Jurid. 44; Lysons's Britannia, ii. part i. 91.]

BECKINGTON

J. M. R.

or BEKYNTON, THOMAS (1390?-1465), bishop of Bath and Wells and lord privy seal, was a native of the Somersetshire village from which he derived his surname. His parentage is unknown, and there is no record of the date of his birth, but from the dates of his admission, first at Winchester (1404) and afterwards at New College, Oxford (1406), it is presumed to have been about 1390. He was admitted a fellow of New College in 1408, and retained his fellowship twelve years. He took the degree of LL.D. In 1420, when he resigned his fellowship, he entered the service of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester; from which time, apparently, church preferments began to flow in upon him. The rectory of St. Leonard's, near Hastings, and the vicarage of Sutton Courtney, in Berks, were perhaps not among the first. Indeed, there are grounds for supposing the former to have been given him in 1439. He had become archdeacon of Buckinghamshire, it appears, before the death of Henry V in 1422, though a later date is given in Le Neve; and in April next year we find him collated to the prebend of Bilton in York, which he exchanged for that of Warthill in the same cathedral four months later. He was appointed to a canonry in Wells in 1439, and was also master of St. Katherine's Hospital, near the Tower of London. But early in 1423 he was already dean of the Arches, in which capacity he assisted at the trial of the heretic William Tailor; and in Nov. 1428 he was appointed, along with the celebrated canonist, William Lyndewood, receiver of the subsidy granted by the lower house of convocation for the expenses of the prosecution of William Russell, another suspected heretic. He was prolocutor of convocation at least as early as 1433, and so continued till May 1438. During the session of 1434 he was commissioned by Archbishop Chichele to draw up, along with others, certain comminatory articles to be proclaimed by the clergy in their parishes four times a year. Meanwhile he had been engaged in several public capacities. In February 1432 he had been nominated to go on embassy to France with Langdon, bishop of Rochester, and Sir Henry Bromflete, to negotiate a peace; but the envoys do not appear to have left till December following, when Sir John Fastolf was substituted for Sir Henry Bromflete. It has been erroneously stated that he was also sent to the

congress at Arras in 1435; but it is certain that he was a member of the great embassy sent to Calais in 1439 to treat with the French ambassadors. Of this embassy he has left a journal, in which he styles himself the king's secretary-an office probably conferred upon him just before, though he appears to have acted in that capacity, at least occasionally, for about two years previously. After his return from this embassy he was for three or four years in close attendance upon the king, and speaks of himself at one time as being his reader nearly every day.

In the spring of 1442 an embassy was sent to England by John IV, count of Armagnac, who desired to offer one of his daughters in marriage to young King Henry VI. They were well received, and three officers of the royal household, of whom Beckington was one, were immediately despatched in return to the court of Armagnac fully empowered to contract the proposed alliance. Their commission bore date 28 May 1442, and on 5 June they set out from Windsor. An interesting diary, written by one of Beckington's suite, describes their progress to the west coast, where they took shipping at Plymouth, the letters and messages that overtook them on the road, the voyage and arrival at Bordeaux, where they received alarming news of the progress of the enemy and the capture of Sir Thomas Rempstone, seneschal of Bordeaux. They nevertheless continued for some time to prosecute the object of their mission; but the state of the country and the severity of the season interposed such difficulties in the way that they thought it best to return in the beginning of the following year. Beckington landed again at Falmouth on 10 Feb., met the king ten days later at Maidenhead, and on the 21st arrived in London, where he supped with the lord mayor. Next day he visited Greenwich with Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. On the 23rd he heard mass at his own hospital of St. Katherine's, dined with the lord treasurer, and supped again with the lord mayor. On Sunday the 26th he rejoined the king at Shene, and resumed his duties as secretary; soon after which he was appointed lord privy seal.

The chief effect of this embassy and of its return was to impress upon the government at home the necessity of taking more active steps to avert-as they succeeded in doing for a few years-the threatened loss of Guienne. The marriage negotiation was a failure. Even the artist employed, according to their instructions, to take likenesses of the count of Armagnac's three daughters, that the king might choose which of them he preferred, was

unable to do his work: the frost had congealed his colours when he had barely completed one portrait, and the envoys saw good reason to return home without waiting for the other two. But the result nowise tended to diminish the influence of Beckington, who not only, as we have seen, continued to receive new marks of the king's favour, but had ere this made friends at the court of Rome as well; by whose means, in that same year 1443, he was rather too precipitately nominated by the pope to the see of Salisbury, which it was supposed Bishop Ascough would vacate in order to be promoted to the see of Canterbury. But, as Ascough declined to leave Salisbury, John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, was elevated to the primacy, and Beckington was made bishop of Bath in Stafford's room. His agent at Rome meanwhile had unluckily paid into the papal treasury a considerable sum for the firstfruits of Salisbury, and Beckington obtained a letter from the king himself, directing him to get it, if possible, charged to the account of the see of Bath. How the matter was settled does not appear; but on 13 Oct. Beckington was consecrated bishop of Bath and Wells by William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln. The rite was performed in the old collegiate church at Eton, and Beckington the same day celebrated mass in pontificalibus under a tent within the new church, then not half built, and held his inaugural banquet within the college buildings. As might be expected in one who was so greatly in the confidence of the royal founder, he had taken a strong interest in the new college from the first, and one of his latest acts as archdeacon of Buckinghamshire was to exempt the provost from his own jurisdiction, placing him directly under the bishop of Lincoln as visitor and ordinary.

As bishop of Bath he had in 1445 a controversy with Nicholas Frome, abbot of Glastonbury, an old man who, tenacious of the privileges of his monastery, resented episcopal visitation, and whom Beckington, with unseemly severity, taunted with the infirmities of age. He had a much more pleasing correspondence with Thomas Chandler, who was first warden of Winchester College, then warden of New College, Oxford, and afterwards chancellor of Wells, who looked up to him as a patron. But on the whole it may be said that his personal history, after he became bishop, is uninteresting. His name occurs as trier of petitions in parliament from 1444 to 1453, but no particular act is recorded of him. On 18 June 1452 he obtained an exemption from further attendance in parliament on account of his age and

infirmities-a privilege which Edward IV confirmed to him in 1461. He died at Wells on 14 Jan. 1465, and was buried in a fine tomb, built by himself in his lifetime, in the south aisle of the choir. In our own day, during some repairs of the cathedral in 1850, this tomb was opened, and the remains of his skeleton were inspected. It was that of a tall man with a well-formed skull.

Active as his life was, and interesting also in a literary point of view, from his correspondence with learned men both in England and at Rome, Beckington's chief claim upon the regard of posterity is the munificence with which he adorned with fine buildings his cathedral city of Wells. Besides rebuilding the episcopal palace, he supplied the town with a public conduit and fountain, and erected the close of the vicars choral and fifteen tenements in the market place. His curious rebus, a flaming beacon (commonly spelt bekyn in those days) and a tun or barrel, is seen carved in various quarters, not only at Wells, but at Winchester and in Lincoln College, Oxford. His bequests in his will were princely, and show his strong attachment, not only to the colleges and places of education, but to all the different churches with which he had been connected.

[Memoir by Nicolas, prefixed to Journal of an Embassy to the Count of Armagnac; Official Correspondence of Bekynton, edited by G. Williams, B.D., in Rolls Series, in the introduction to which are some important corrections of Nicolas; Chandler's Life of Waynflete.] J. G. BECKINSALL, JOHN. [See BEKIN

SAU.]

BECKLEY, WILLIAM (d. 1438), Carmelite, was born in Kent, probably in the neighbourhood of Sandwich, where he appears to have entered the order of the Carmelites in early life. While still young he proceeded to Cambridge, where the Carmelites had had a house since the year 1291. Here he seems to have taken his doctor's degree in divinity, and to have established a considerable reputation as a theologian. Bale praises his modesty of speech, and his firm proceedings against evildoers in all the assemblies ('conventibus') over which he presided. This incidental remark would alone prove him to have been a man of mark among the English Carmelites, even without the next sentence, in which we are told that while Beckley was engaged in the king's business Thomas Walden used to protect his interests at Cambridge against the complaints of his fellow-doctors there. Tanner makes mention of a letter from the chancellor and university of Cambridge