the world.  She commanded Dr. Meryon to return to Europe, and he—­how could he have done it?—­obeyed her.  Her health was broken, she was over sixty, and, save for her vile servants, absolutely alone.  She lived for nearly a year after he left her—­we know no more.  She had vowed never again to pass through the gate of her house; but did she sometimes totter to her garden—­that beautiful garden which she had created, with its roses and its fountains, its alleys and its bowers—­and look westward at the sea?  The end came in June 1839.  Her servants immediately possessed themselves of every moveable object in the house.  But Lady Hester cared no longer:  she was lying back in her bed—­inexplicable, grand, preposterous, with her nose in the air.

1919.

MR. CREEVEY

Clio is one of the most glorious of the Muses; but, as everyone knows, she (like her sister Melpomene) suffers from a sad defect:  she is apt to be pompous.  With her buskins, her robes, and her airs of importance she is at times, indeed, almost intolerable.  But fortunately the Fates have provided a corrective.  They have decreed that in her stately advances she should be accompanied by certain apish, impish creatures, who run round her tittering, pulling long noses, threatening to trip the good lady up, and even sometimes whisking to one side the corner of her drapery, and revealing her undergarments in a most indecorous manner.  They are the diarists and letter-writers, the gossips and journalists of the past, the Pepyses and Horace Walpoles and Saint-Simons, whose function it is to reveal to us the littleness underlying great events and to remind us that history itself was once real life.  Among them is Mr. Creevey.  The Fates decided that Mr. Creevey should accompany Clio, with appropriate gestures, during that part of her progress which is measured by the thirty years preceding the accession of Victoria; and the little wretch did his job very well.

It might almost be said that Thomas Creevey was ’born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly.’  At any rate, we know nothing of his youth, save that he was educated at Cambridge, and he presents himself to us in the early years of the nineteenth century as a middle-aged man, with a character and a habit of mind already fixed and an established position in the world.  In 1803 we find him what he was to be for the rest of his life—­a member of Parliament, a familiar figure in high society, an insatiable gossip with a rattling tongue.  That he should have reached and held the place he did is a proof of his talents, for he was a very poor man; for the greater part of his life his income was less than L200 a year.  But those were the days of patrons and jobs, pocket-boroughs and sinecures; they were the days, too, of vigorous, bold living, torrential talk, and splendid hospitality; and it was only natural