er for a pocket-borough and
ended it as the holder of a sinecure. For a time his poverty was
relieved by his marriage with a widow who had means of her own; but Mrs.
Creevey died, her money went to her daughters by her previous husband,
and Mr. Creevey reverted to a possessionless existence--without a house,
without servants, without property of any sort--wandering from country
mansion to country mansion, from dinner-party to dinner-party, until at
last in his old age, on the triumph of the Whigs, he was rewarded with a
pleasant little post which brought him in about L600 a year. Apart from
these small ups and downs of fortune, Mr. Creevey's life was
static--static spiritually, that is to say; for physically he was always
on the move. His adventures were those of an observer, not of an actor;
but he was an observer so very near the centre of things that he was by
no means dispassionate; the rush of great events would whirl him round
into the vortex, like a leaf in an eddy of wind; he would rave, he would
gesticulate, with the fury of a complete partisan; and then, when the
wind dropped, he would be found, like the leaf, very much where he was
before. Luckily, too, he was not merely an agitated observer, but an
observer who delighted in passing on his agitations, first with his
tongue, and then--for so the Fates had decided--with his pen. He wrote
easily, spicily, and persistently; he had a favourite stepdaughter,
with whom he corresponded for years; and so it happens that we have
preserved to us, side by side with the majestic march of Clio (who, of
course, paid not the slightest attention to him), Mr. Creevey's
exhilarating _pas de chat_.

Certainly he was not over-given to the praise of famous men. There are
no great names in his vocabulary--only nicknames: George III. is 'Old
Nobs,' the Regent 'Prinney,' Wellington 'the Beau,' Lord John Russell
'Pie and Thimble,' Brougham, with whom he was on friendly terms, is
sometimes 'Bruffam,' sometimes 'Beelzebub,' and sometimes 'Old
Wickedshifts'; and Lord Durham, who once remarked that one could 'jog
along on L40,000 a year,' is 'King Jog.' The latter was one of the great
Whig potentates, and it was characteristic of Creevey that his
scurrility should have been poured out with a special gusto over his
own leaders. The Tories were villains, of course--Canning was all
perfidy and 'infinite meanness,' Huskisson a mass of 'intellectual
confusion and mental dirt,' Castlereagh ...