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.