by day and night, on two several occasions and estates, for many months.  Where other men got together moderate collections of bibelots, Beckford amassed whole museums.  If a builder’s neglect or a fire destroyed his rarities and damaged his estates to the extent of forty or fifty thousand pounds, Beckford merely rebuilt and re-collected.  These tastes and lavish expenditures gradually set themselves in a current toward things Eastern.  His magnificent retreat at Cintra in Portugal, his vast Fonthill Abbey and Lansdowne Hill estates in England, were only appanages of his sumptuous state.  England and Europe talked of him and of his properties.  He was a typical egotist:  but an agreeable and gracious man, esteemed by a circle of friends not called upon to be his sycophants; and he kept in close touch with the intellectual life of all Europe.

He wrote much, for an amateur, and in view of the tale which does him most honor, he wrote with success.  At twenty he invited publicity with a satiric jeu d’esprit, ’Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters’; and his ‘Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal,’ and ’Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaba and Baltalha,’ were well received.  But these books could not be expected to survive even three generations; whereas ‘Vathek,’ the brilliant, the unique, the inimitable ‘Vathek,’ took at once a place in literature which we may now almost dare to call permanent.  This story, not a long one,—­indeed, no more than a novelette in size,—­was originally written in French, and still lives in that language; in which an edition, hardly the best, has lately been issued under the editorship of M. Mallarme.  But its history is complicated by one of the most notable acts of literary treachery and theft on record.  During the author’s slow and finicky composition of it at Lausanne, he was sending it piecemeal to his friend Robert Henley in England for Henley to make an English version, of course to be revised by himself.  As soon as Henley had all the parts, he published a hasty and slipshod translation, before Beckford had seen it or was even ready to publish the French original; and not only did so, but published it as a tale translated by himself from a genuine Arabic original.  This double violation of good faith of course enraged Beckford, and practically separated the two men for the rest of their lives; indeed, the wonder is that Beckford would ever recognize Henley’s existence again.  The piracy was exposed and set aside, and Beckford in self-defense issued the story himself in French as soon as he could; indeed, he issued it in two versions with curious and interesting differences, one published at Lausanne and the other at Paris.  The Lausanne edition is preferable.