Excerpt from Italy, Spain, and Portugal, Vol. 1 of 2: With an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcoba a and Batalha HE inheritance of wealth destroys more greatness than it stimulates. In Spite of his brilliant successes in literature, William Beckford, the author of Vathek, is an example of genius marred by wealth. Had he been left with only a moderate competence, he might have become one or the brightest stars of imaginative literature. The youth who could write Vathek in French at twenty-two, and at the same time pen the striking travel-letters we here reprint, appeared capable of any success in the realm of literary expression. Whether the death of his wife, Lady Margaret Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Aboyne, after only three years of married life, had anything to do with his subsequent lapse into the somewhat misanthropic connoisseur and collector who astonished England by the Oriental magnificence he gathered round him at Font hill, we cannot tell. But he never fulfilled the promise Of his youth, and throughout his lifetime was best known as an eccentric lover of magnificence, shrouded in mystery which titillated while it baffled vulgar curiosity.

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