Ipeter Becl?tor^ ii 



with his name attached, and in the preface thus defends 

 himself from the charge of inhumanity : ' All inten- 

 tional cruelty the author entirely disclaims. His appeal 

 from that accusation lies to those whom he addresses — 

 his judges ; not (as the critic may think) because they 

 are equally barbarous with himself, but because sports- 

 men only are competent to decide.' And I think that 

 appeal is both dignified and sensible. 



I shall revert to these two works of Beckford's pre- 

 sently. But they are not by any means his only title to 

 literary distinction. In 1787, just before the French 

 Revolution, he, like Arthur Young, travelled through 

 France and Italy, and embodied his impressions of travel 

 in a very entertaining series of Familiar Letters from 

 Italy to a Friend in England. The letters are most 

 agreeably written and seasoned with racy anecdotes and 

 with philosophical and political reflections, remarkable 

 for their astuteness and penetration. Among the cele- 

 brities whom he visited were Voltaire and Rousseau, of 

 whom he has much that is interesting to tell. He met 

 Laurence Sterne too, in Italy, and to use his own words, 

 ' passed hours with that eccentric genius that might have 

 been more profitably employed, but never more agree- 

 ably.' 



The fine old scholar sportsman, who, despite all his 

 culture and scholarship, could hold his own as a trencher- 

 man and bon vivant against the hardest headed country 

 squire in Dorset or anywhere else, lived just a year over 

 the threescore and ten, and died on the 1 8th of February 

 181 1. He lies buried in Stapleton Church with this 

 quaint couplet on his tomb : — 



' We die and are forg^otten : 'tis Heaven's decree : 

 Thus the fate of others will be the fate of mc' 



