FONTHILL AND BECKFORD.
It was at Bath that Pitt and Sheridan lived, but its most eccentric resident was William Beckford, the author of Vathek, who came to Bath from Fonthill, not far from Salisbury. His father, a London alderman, owned Fonthill, and died in 1770, leaving his son William, aged ten, with $5,000,000 ready money and $500,000 annual income. He wrote Vathek in early life after extensive travels, but founded its scenes and characters upon places and people at Fonthill. He then began building Fonthill Abbey, shrouding his proceedings in the greatest mystery and surrounding his estate with a wall twelve feet high and seven miles long, guarded by chevaux-de-frise to keep out intruders. The building of the abbey was to him a romance pursued with wild enthusiasm. So anxious was he to get it finished that he employed relays of men, working day and night and throughout Sunday, keeping them liberally supplied with liquor. The first tower was built of wood, four hundred feet high, to see its effect, and it was then taken down and the same form put up in wood covered with cement. This fell down, and the third tower was built of masonry. When the idea of the abbey occurred to Beckford he was extending a small summer-house, but he was in such a hurry that he would not remove the summer-house to make a proper foundation for the tower, but carried it up on the walls already standing, the work being done in wretched style and chiefly by semi-drunken men. He employed five hundred men day and night at the work, and once the torches used set fire to the tower at the top, a sight that he greatly enjoyed. Beckford lived at the abbey, practically a hermit, for nearly twenty years, but his fortunes being impaired he removed to Bath in 1822. Preparatory to selling Fonthill, he opened the long-sealed place to public exhibition at a guinea a ticket, and sold seventy-two hundred tickets. Then for thirty-seven days he conducted an auction-sale of the treasures at Fonthill, charging a half-guinea admission. He ultimately sold the estate for $1,750,000. In 1825 the tower, which had been insecurely built, fell with a great crash, and so frightened the new owner, who was an invalid, that, though unhurt by the disaster, he died soon afterwards. The estate was again sold and the abbey taken down, so that now only the foundations can be traced.