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Updated: June 22, 2025
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.
She is still of great beauty; but at that time she was a wonder of loveliness. Slender, graceful, with a figure exquisitely shaped; with rosy lips as artless as an infant's; grand dark eyes which seemed to burn with an inner light as she looked at you; such was Miss Mortimer at eighteen, when I first saw her on that night in the Fonthill woods."
When I saw that an armed collision was going to take place, I hastened back, reaching Virginia in the winter of 1860. But I did not come to Fonthill. I had a horror of the place.
Piozzi; who read the "Vicar of Wakefield" the day it was published; who had heard Haydn, the composer, playing at a concert, "dressed out with a sword"; who had listened to Talleyrand's best sayings from his own lips; who had seen John Wesley lying dead in his coffin, "an old man, with the countenance of a little child"; who had been with Beckford at Fonthill; who had seen Porson slink back into the dining-room after the company had left it and drain what was left in the wineglasses; who had crossed the Apennines with Byron; who had seen Beau Nash in the height of his career dancing minuets at Bath; who had known Lady Hamilton in her days of beauty, and seen her often with Lord Nelson; who was in Fox's room when that great man lay dying; and who could describe Pitt from personal observation, speaking always as if his mouth was "full of worsted."
For Cleveland, having attended eight days at a sale, and having moreover ransacked all the curiosity shops, and shipped off bronzes and cabinets, and Genoese silks and objets de vertu, enough to have half furnished Fonthill, had fulfilled his mission, and returned to his villa.
Came from Fonthill, I believe. Admirably suited for a religious subject, Mr. Gray." "I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, Mr. Hubbard. I shall certainly drop in and look at the frame though I don't go in much at present for religious art but to-day I only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me.
"To-morrow is our grand day, you know. Where shall we go?" "I have leave from three till nine. Wherever we can get to and come back from in that time. Not ruins, Jude I don't care for them." "Well Wardour Castle. And then we can do Fonthill if we like all in the same afternoon." "Wardour is Gothic ruins and I hate Gothic!" "No. Quite otherwise.
Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue.
Then on the top of the hill is old Vathek's Tower, which he used to sit and read in daily, and from which he could see his own Fonthill, while it stood. Old Landor quoted to me 'Nullus in orbe locus, etc., apropos of Bath: he, you may know, has lived here for years, and I should think would die here, though not yet.
The former was, as has been said, one of the richest men in England, the creator of two "Paradises" at Fonthill and Cintra, the absolute arbiter of his time and his pleasures, a Member of Parliament while he chose to be so, a student, fierce and recluse, the husband of a daughter of the Gordons, and the father of a mother of the Hamiltons, the collector, disperser, bequeather of libraries almost unequalled in magnificence and choice.
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