tuffed with pate de foie gras, gorgeous Madeiras, ancient Ports. Wine
had a double advantage: it made you drunk; it also made you sober: it
was its own cure. On one occasion, when Sheridan, after days of riotous
living, showed signs of exhaustion, Mr. and Mrs. Creevey pressed upon
him 'five or six glasses of light French wine' with excellent effect.
Then, at midnight, when the talk began to flag and the spirits grew a
little weary, what could be more rejuvenating than to ring the bell for
a broiled bone? And one never rang in vain--except, to be sure, at King
Jog's. There, while the host was guzzling, the guests starved. This was
too much for Mr. Creevey, who, finding he could get nothing for
breakfast, while King Jog was 'eating his own fish as comfortably as
could be,' fairly lost his temper.

My blood beginning to boil, I said: 'Lambton, I wish you could tell
me what quarter I am to apply to for some fish.' To which he
replied in the most impertinent manner: 'The servant, I suppose.' I
turned to Mills and said pretty loud: 'Now, if it was not for the
fuss and jaw of the thing, I would leave the room and the house
this instant'; and dwelt on the damned outrage. Mills said: 'He
hears every word you say': to which I said: 'I hope he does.' It
was a regular scene.

A few days later, however, Mr. Creevey was consoled by finding himself
in a very different establishment, where 'everything is of a
piece--excellent and plentiful dinners, a fat service of plate, a fat
butler, a table with a barrel of oysters and a hot pheasant, &c.,
wheeled into the drawing-room every night at half-past ten.'

It is difficult to remember that this was the England of the Six Acts,
of Peterloo, and of the Industrial Revolution. Mr. Creevey, indeed,
could hardly be expected to remember it, for he was utterly unconscious
of the existence--of the possibility--of any mode of living other than
his own. For him, dining-rooms 50 feet long, bottles of Madeira, broiled
bones, and the brightest yellow satin were as necessary and obvious a
part of the constitution of the universe as the light of the sun and
the law of gravity. Only once in his life was he seriously ruffled; only
once did a public question present itself to him as something alarming,
something portentous, something more than a personal affair. The
occasion is significant. On March 16, 1825, he writes:

I have come to the conclusion that our F