New-York tribune. [volume], September 17, 1905, Page 2, Image 18

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2
FONTHILL HOUSE, WITH WING OF FONTHILL 81
LITERARY WILTSHIRE.
Wilton House and Beckford's Font
hill—A Bit of Italy.
Bishop's Fonthill. Wilts, September 8.
Rvory English shire has its literary traditions
and atmosphere. There may not be a name of
nnique pre-eminence, as there is in Warwick
shire, or the Wordsworth country, or Tenny
son's Lincolnshire and Isle of Wight, >or Kings
loy's North Devon, or the land of Lorna Doone;
yet the serene radiance of a galaxy of minor
1; '!i! will not be lacking. Wiltshire has been for
generations the birthplace and refuge of poets,
philosophers and men of letters. Sir Philip Sid
ney v.-rote a portion of his "Arcadia" In the
beautiful grounds of Wilton House, the rplen
did home of the Herberts, where Shakespeare
nr .1 i company of strolling players were to fol
low him In entertaining royalty; and illustra
tions for the wort are now shown on the walls,
and privileged visitors are allowed to see his
favorite tree in the garden and a lock of hair
which Queen Elisabeth sent to him. Addison
vfar, born near Stonehenge; George Herbert
wrote his best hymns In the rectory of Bomer
ton Church, near Salisbury; Crabbe's grave was
dug at Trcrabridge, where he had enjoyed a jolly
old age; Coloridga sought release In the chalk
downs from the bondage of opium; Dryden,
Thomson and Wordsworth were frequent vis
itors in the shire, and Thomas Moore found a
mug retreat In a cottage near Bowood, and was
buried there.
The groat Chatham lived near Old Sarum;
Lord Clarendon, born not far away, at Dinton,
wrote his history near by at Hatch House be
yon ;1 Fonthill; the earlier chronicler, William
of Malmesbury, was trained in a Wiltshire mon
)-t< •••>•. and Thomas Hobbes was born among
• > Marlborough downs. Sir Walter Raleigh
had strange adventures on the southern border
r^ar Fhorbourne; the judicious Hooker compiled
his laborious work in a rectory not far from
Salisbury; Izaak Walton fished in the chalk
streams; Henry Fielding ran through a small
estate and a large pack of hounds near Mere;
Arnold of Rugby went to school at Warminster;
Dr. Priestley worked out his scientific experi
ments at Colne, and Sydney Smith kept the
tble in a roar when he stayed at the country
houses. Nor should the antiquaries be forgot
>n. Wiltshire has bred many of them, Aubrey,
i*unnin^ton, Britton and Tanner among them,
s,nd General Pitt-Rivers's museum on the Dor
set border offers adequate proof that primitive
art has not lost its fascinations for thoughtful
minds.
Not even Wilton House, with 'ts traditions of
princely patronage of art and literature, and its
ej Undid Van Dycks and Pembroke marbles,
could ever have rivalled the Fonthill treasures
and expenditures. Two millionaires, father and
Bon, had a passion for collecting books, paint
ings and sculpture, and each built a palace and
Btocked it with works of art The elder Bcck
ford, inheriting a vast West Indian fortune, and
earning the friendship of Chatham and groat
popularity among ihe London merchants, gave
the most brilliant fetes which had ever been
known In Wiltshire. The younger Beckford.
after writing the romance of "Vathek," and
wasting a fortune on a castle in Portugal, set
tled down at Fonthill and acquired celebrity
from his revels of extravagance and Improvi
d< nee. He began by rebuilding his father's
mansion on an enlarged scale and by selling the
expensive art treasures and furniture be
queathed to him and replacing thorn with more
Fumptuous works, and he ended by condemning
the site as too near the large lake, and conse
quently damp, and building on higher ground a
Hew abbey with a tower 300 feet high. When the
lower fell through lack of thoroughness in con
etruction he replaced it almost as hastily with
another, which toppled over after he had lost
the bulk of his fortune. The spacious grounds
were laid out and decorated at lavish cost, and
f-urrounded with high walls co keep out tres
passers and sportsmen; and the art collections
wore steadily enriched by purchases from Paris
and Italy. A brilliant amateur, who had ex
cited the admiration of Byron by his Oriental
imagery and opulence of style, he gradually
neglected all interests except collecting and be
came an eccentric dilettante, living in seclusion
like a hermit, toying with costly trifles of vertu
and rummaging in erudite lore.
The younger Beckford, whose coming of age
had been celebrated with bonfires on the hills
NEW- YORK DAILY TRIBUNE. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1905.
and fetes with thousands of lamps, saved a
remnant of his mismanaged fortune by selling
Fonthill to a millionaire; and on the high
ground behind Bath he built another tower from
which he could look over the Somerset hills and
the Wiltshire downs, and Bee with a glass his
famous abbey. The treasure house was emptied
by a series of auction sales, and the pictures,
marbles, bronzes and porcelains were scattered.
The high tower fen and destroyed the abbey
with the exception of a single wing, so that
the learned recluse with his telescope could no
longer see his former home, A mill was con
structed on the border of the lake, and the es
tate, with its hig-h wall seven miles in circuit,
was divided into two sections. The greater part
of the elder Beckford's Fonthill Splendens had
already been burned, with a series of Hogarths
and many works of art; and the splendid park,
with its outlying terraces of woodland, its state
ly gateway, its subterranean labyrinth and its
costly driveways, seemed destined to ruinous
neglect. The wrecking of the Beckford fortune
was fairly complete; but the wilful and luxu
rious recluse, who had brought It about by his
extravagant tastes and business Incapacity,
took his reverses easy and faced old age with
serenity of mind. He had saved the Gibbon
library, with nearly all his own books and some
of the best of his pictures and sculptures; and
he did not change his habits, but continued to
collect books and vertu as long as he lived,
without being embittered by his sense of failure
or seeming to know that he had -.vasted his
life. To the end he loved his rare, old books,
and so long as he could read them he fancied
that he had better company than the stateliest
society of the great
Beckford's splendid estate has suffered less
than he feared it would when a millionaire with
out sympathy for art or landscape gardening
purchased It The cloth mill has disappeared
from the lake; the grandiose gateway of Inlgo
Jones has been restored; a new Fonthill abbey,
In the form of a Scotch castle, has been built
on high ground for Sir Michael Shaw-Stewart,
and surrounded with beautiful lawns and sump
tuous gardens; and the remnant of Fonthill
Splendens has been converted Into an Italian
mansion with a high tower and filled with
art treasures by Mrs. Morrison. Many of the
Beckford drives have been retained and im
proved, and the landscape setting of both houses
is most beautiful, one being approached by
glades with silver firs and the other having an
outlook upon a picturesque lake with a back
ground of wooded hills. Of Beckford's own
abbey a single wing remains, with a small
tower and a fine hall furnished Jn oak, and his
hermit cave lighted by openings In the wood
land can still be entered. The two estates have
been steadily Improved by their wealthy own
ers and can hardly be rivalled In Wiltshire tor
variety of scenery, magnificent cedars, firs, oaks
and beeches, broad prospects and picturesque
terraces. The spirit of virtuoso collecting: to
which Beckford sacrificed his Immense West
Indian fortune, still dominates the park, tor
Fonthill House is renowned for the Morrison
collections of armor, enamels, porcelains, mar
bles, paintings and laces. Many of Beckford's
own treasures are In his father's reconstructed
mansion, and so rich, varied and interesting are
the collections that Hazlitt's description ol the
original Fonthill Abbey seems cold and preju
diced: "A desert of magnificence, a glittering
waste of laborious idlonri-s, a cathedral turned
into a toy shop, an immense museum of all that
is curious and costly, and at the same time mosl
worthless, in the production of art and nature."
The Wiltshire downs, like the chalks and
clays of Dorsetshire, are included in Mr. Hardy's
Wessex. and both Salisbury and Stonehenge
have b<»en described by him in detail He is sel
dom seen outside of Dorchester, except when he
makes his annual pilgrimage to London to en
joy the season in a grim, old fashioned way.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling is a frequent visitor, for
his father lives two miles from the Fonthill es
tates in a comfortable gabled house on the road
to Tisbury. A retired official of the Indian Ed
ucational Service, he amusts himself by paint
ing in water colors, making architectural draw
ings and modelling in clay, and is remarkably
vigorous for a man of sixty-eight More dis
tinctively a Wiltshire man of letters than either
Mr. Hardy or so casual visitor as Mr. Rudyard
Kiplinp is Mr. Maurice Hewlett. B->rn in Kent,
and a Londoner while he was in the civil ser
vice, he bought a few years ago an old rectory
in Broad Chalk, about eight miles from Salis
bury and as many from Fonthill. It was in a
dilapidated condition and had been converted
LENDENS.
into a farmhouse; but it has been a labor of
love for him to restore and to beautify it, and
Mrs. Hewlett has filled it with antique furni
ture collected up and down the English shires.
The little chalk stream which flows behind the
house has been walled in and bridged, and a
scries of Italian gardens have been laid out
with original taste and fine feeling. It is ono
of the most characteristic of the literary homes
of England. His face always brightens when
he speaks of it, and, with a taste for garden
ing as strong as Dean Hole's love of roses, he
is always happiest when he is strolling from
one corner to another and planning changes
which will make the gardens a little less like
prosaic England and a little more like a sunny
bit of Italy. L N. F.
AN ECLIPSE OF LUCK.
Professor G. A. Hill, of the United States Na
val Observatory, said, before sailing to study
the sun's eclipse:
"I have high hopes of this expedition, but a
cloud may ruin all. I desire to come baok over
loaded with priceless solar photographs, but
everything depends on chance, and perhaps I
will return as empty handed as a farm boy
from my native town who went to New-York
THE TERRACE, WILTON HOUSE.
THS NEW FON THILL ABBEY.
to seek his fortune. For «rtx months not a wot*
was heard from him. Then, one wintor after
noon his father got this note:
" 'Dear Pa— Meet me under the old bridge to
morrow night after dark. Bring with yotl a
blanket or a suit of clothe I have a. I
WENT ABOUT IT THE WRONG WAT.
Campbell, the chauffeur w"ho won the Sl/**>
Cape May trophy, was talking at the Windsor,
where he stopred, about his success as a racer.
He declared that he had not -jumped unprepared
Into racing, as the Valne skipper jump"! into
sign painting. This .skipr<"r and his rr.'n were
putting the finishing touches on a new schooner.
When it came to painting thct mmi on the
beat's stern the men hesitated, fearing to maka
a botch of so difficult a Job. But the skipper
reproached them for their cowardice, and threw
himself on his stomach upon the deck with a
pot of paint and a brush, arcl, reaching down
over the side, in due course he finished the
name— 3l MX I
SUDDEN CHANGE OF VIEW.
District Attorney Jerome was diSCUK ! I
absurd defences that criminal la
induce their clients to set up. "Th
mind me." he said, "at an eW
was walking along the street i Ith her f
of twelve. Suddenly she halted, enraged.
" 'Look at that intoxicated brute across the
way,' she exclaimed. "Did you ever sa
thing so disgusting? Where are the r°- ;
course, never at hand wh< n ih y'r- «
That drunken beast ought to be locked
a year.'
"The boy. who had been looking b I
through the dusk at the reeling man, r.ow :
In a low voice:
" 'Why. mother, that's brother BIDL"
"At this the woman threw up her hands
gesture of horror and despair.
" "Oh,' she cried, 'the saloonkeepers have !
druggin' that poor child apain.' "
TOOK HONEYMOON SEPARATELY.
Charles Felton Pidgin, the statistician of
Massachusetts, is studying the question of race
suicide. The other day he said:
"I knew in Roxbury, when I live there, ■
Scotch tobacconist who got married. V
him a few days after the wedding, I said:
" 'Why. Donald, I thought you were away on
your honeymoon?
- 'Will, so we are.' the Pimple young fellow
answered. "Mary Is down at Cousin Tan far
a week, and I'm goin' to take a week when sh«
comes hack.' "