Creevey, “I grieve for the opportunity which has been lost of acquiring national glory, but I am not sorry to see the Wellesley pride a little lowered.” The next year witnessed the lamentable failure of the Walcheren Expedition, and Wellesley’s victory of Talavera. Captain Graham Moore, brother to Sir John Moore, writes to Creevey: “The Cannings are in a damned dilemma with this expedition and the victory of Talavera. They mean, I understand, to saddle poor Lord Chatham with the first, but who can they saddle the victory with? They cannot attack the Wellesleys as they did my poor brother. What a cursed set you (politicians) are.” The passage of the Douro by Wellesley led to Mr. Whitbred addressing the General in most complimentary terms; but the war occupied people’s thoughts but little, the main interest being centred in the exposure of the scandalous sale of commissions in the army by Mrs. Clarke, a friend of the Duke of York’s. Two years later, in 1811, Creevey takes encouragement from the number of sick in the army of Portugal and hopes it may bring about peace, and when the war in Spain was nearing its victorious conclusion a friend writes to him, abusing Wellington. These remarks are indeed the mild utterances of leaders of a party more interested in disparaging their political opponents than in the progress of the war. When we turn to the extreme wing of the party we find Napoleon a hero and his defeat a calamity: “But even with such mighty odds against him the towering and gigantic genius of Napoleon would have defied them all, if English money had not bribed some of his generals. It was this, and this only, that completed his downfall. To talk of the Duke of Wellington as the conqueror of Napoleon is an insult to the understanding of any intelligent man; and for Lord Castlereagh to have boasted of having subdued him as his lordship was wont to do, was pitiful, was wondrous pitiful.” So wrote Lady Ann Hamilton; in the same strain also at an earlier period spoke Mr. Fox of the virtues of his country’s greatest and most determined enemy. It is thus that history repeats itself in the wars my country has waged in her long history. I now pass to a character very different from Creevey’s, to the man who ruled the fashionable world with an authority even more undisputed than that of the Prince of Wales, Beau Brummell, the prince of the dandies. The Beau had no advantages of birth and only a moderate fortune. It is often the custom to regard him as a mere coxcomb, the outcome of a frivolous society fitted only to point a moral and adorn a tale. I venture to take a more charitable view of him and to give my opinion that he owed his ascendancy to something more than extravagance of dress and unbounded impudence.