One man, however, without the advantages of birth or wealth, enjoyed the privilege of moving freely in this charmed circle, in the person of Mr. Creevey, whose memoirs only appeared in 1903. His editor, Sir Herbert Maxwell, describes his abilities as hardly of the second order, but I must confess that, considering the position he occupied in the party, I cannot share his opinion. Married to a Mrs. Orde and apparently living on his wife’s moderate fortune, sitting for Thetford, a close borough of the Duke of Norfolk’s, and after his wife’s death subsisting on an income of £200 ($1000) a year, he never stooped to flatter, gave his advice without fear or favour, and, when the Duke put him out of his seat in the House of Commons, wrote the head of the English peerage a letter which shewed that he looked on his patron as an equal who had treated him very shabbily. From the Duke’s reply to “My dear Creevey” it is easy to see that his Grace recognised that he had offended, not a humble dependant, but a man of great political and social influence. I am now going to select a few passages dating from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens in 1803 and onwards, shewing how England was rent by faction, even in the most perilous days of the war with Napoleon. Remember that often the country was fighting alone against perhaps the greatest genius the world has ever seen, and that her position at times appeared to be almost hopeless. In 1804, when Buonaparte’s camp was established at Boulogne ready for the invasion of England, party feeling ran extraordinarily high. Pitt was becoming impatient of the incompetence of his friend Addington; and, as a party manœuvre, he moved for an inquiry into the conduct of Admiral Lord St. Vincent and was supported by Fox. Creevey writes that he is convinced that the accused is innocent; but still he felt bound to vote with Fox. “I am,” he says, “more passionately attached every day to party. I am certain that without it nothing can be done.” A month later the King’s madness was coming on, and Creevey hopes that this attack will make an end of him as a ruler. “I hope that the Monarch is done and can no longer make ministers.” Later on, the prospect of disaffection in Ireland fills Creevey with hopes that Pitt’s position may become impossible; he says, “The country engaged in a new war unnecessarily undertaken and ungraciously entered upon, the Catholics discontented, and the Opposition unbroken. If such a combination of circumstances does not shake the Treasury bench, what can?” The next year, 1805 (Trafalgar), brings to Mr. Creevey and his friends the hope that Mr. Pitt may be exposed for lending Government money to a firm which had recently gone bankrupt. In 1808, when Sir Arthur Wellesley began his work in the Peninsula, the convention of Cintra made him most unpopular; and the nation was, says Sir Herbert Maxwell, “almost unanimous in demanding his degradation if not his death.” Mr. Whitbred writes to Mr.