that Mr. Creevey, penniless and immensely entertaining,
should have been put into Parliament by a Duke, and
welcomed in every great Whig House in the country
with open arms. It was only natural that, spending
his whole political life as an advanced Whig, bent
upon the destruction of abuses, he should have begun
that life as a member 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 ...
But all that was obvious and hardly worth mentioning;
what was really too exacerbating to be borne was the
folly and vileness of the Whigs. ‘King Jog,’
the ‘Bogey,’ ‘Mother Cole,’
and the rest of them—they were either knaves
or imbeciles. Lord Grey was an exception; but
then Lord Grey, besides passing the Reform Bill, presented
Mr. Creevey with the Treasurership of the Ordnance,
and in fact was altogether a most worthy man.