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Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/117778
laid out the city almost three hundred years ago: long boulevards (Great Pulteney Street), ample parks (Henrietta Gardens), formal squares (Queen's), dramatic circles (the King's Circus), long winding thoroughfares (the Paragon), and the distinctive crescents that mark each level of the city's many hills (Royal, Cavendish, Camden, Lansdown). It was to this last crescent, the highest of them all, that I was eventually headed. I was following in the footsteps of William Beckford, but Beckford had traveled far – and famously lived elsewhere – before he finally, and permanently, landed on Lansdown. He was the son of the richest man in England, a London merchant who traded in slaves and other commodities in the West Indies in the middle of the eighteenth century. Beckford had every advantage the Augustan age in England could afford a prodigious arriviste: private tutors (Mozart gave him music lessons), the obligatory grand tour, a torrid affair with another young man (which eventually prevented him from snagging a peerage), a wife who remained loyal to her complicated and often cantankerous husband, and ample funds to collect whatever his heart desired – and his heart desired the best of just about everything. In the literary world, Beckford is best known for his short novel entitled Vathek, a pan-sexual gothic Asian romance that was translated from the French and edited HYLAND