such a good thing as reason. He need have been under little apprehension on that score. The Νόμος is no less powerful in modern times than Grote represents it to have been amongst the ancient Greeks; exercising still plenary power, spiritual as well as temporal, over individual minds, and moulding emotion as well as intellect according to the local type. Men like Day, who evolve a code of morals for themselves, and consistently act upon it in defiance of the law and custom of their contemporaries, will never be At the same time, their consistency in such a set of fixed principles is not necessarily wisdom. And it must be admitted that Day affords a striking example of the failure of one of the bestintentioned of men who ever lived, to compress human life within the rigid limits of a cast-iron system.

very numerous.

From an

WILLIAM BECKFORD.

THE SPLENDID AUTHOR OF

'VATHEK.'

WHEN William Beckford died in 1844, a crowd of no less than 20,000 persons assembled at his funeral. His reputation as an author would never have attracted such a concourse of people. But rumour had been busy with his name in other connections. He was known to have inherited, when a child, one of the largest private fortunes in Europe. It was known that he had built for himself, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, a succession of lordly pleasure-housesthe earthly paradise at Cintra, celebrated by Byron in Childe Harold, the great Gothic abbey at Fonthill, and the lesser, but nevertheless splendid, Tower on the top of Lansdowne Hill at Bath-all of which he had filled to overflowing with fine pictures, rare books, and costly specimens of the artistic work and bric-àbrac of all nations and ages. It was also known that he had had reverses, and that he had spent the greater part of his life in strict seclusion. And there were graver rumours concerning this spoilt child of fortune. It was said that a mysterious blight had fallen upon him; that, like the occupant of Tennyson's Palace

E

of Art, he had said to his soul, 'Make merry and carouse,' but that, after thriving and prospering for some years, he had fallen

'Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears,

Struck through with pangs of hell.'

Popular rumour, in this case as in so many others, had overshot the mark; and, as a matter of fact, there is nothing specially marvellous or tragic to be discovered in William Beckford's history. At the same time, it is perfectly clear, from what can now be gleaned about him, that but for the extraordinary ineptitude of his chosen biographer, Cyrus Redding, Beckford's character and career would have afforded abundant material for a highly interesting psychological study.

He was born on October 1, 1760, and came of an old Gloucestershire family, said to have been settled at Bekeford, near Tewkesbury, before the Conquest. He had great pride in his pedigree, and, with more or less countenance from the Herald's Office, he traced his line back on the father's side to John of Gaunt, and on the mother's side to a Norman cobbler named Olider de Crespin. What, however, is a good deal more certain is that his father was that Lord Mayor Beckford, the friend of Chatham and of Wilkes, who made the celebrated impromptu reply to George III. when that monarch snubbed a certain deputation from the Corporation of the City of London, and that his