LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
Documents Biography Criticism
The Creevey Papers
Thomas Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 24 August 1827
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
DOCUMENT INFORMATION
GO TO PAGE NUMBER:
Introduction
Vol. I. Contents
Ch. I: 1793-1804
Ch. II: 1805
Ch. III: 1805
Ch. IV: 1806-08
Ch. V: 1809
Ch. VI: 1810
Ch. VII: 1811
Ch. VIII: 1812
Ch. IX: 1813-14
Ch X: 1814-15
Ch XI: 1815-16
Ch XII: 1817-18
Ch XIII: 1819-20
Vol. II. Contents
Ch I: 1821
Ch. II: 1822
Ch. III: 1823-24
Ch. IV: 1825-26
Ch. V: 1827
Ch. VI: 1827-28
Ch. VII: 1828
Ch. VIII: 1829
Ch. IX: 1830-31
Ch. X: 1832-33
Ch. XI: 1833
Ch. XII: 1834
Ch XIII: 1835-36
Ch XIV: 1837-38
Index
Creative Commons License

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Produced by CATH
 
“Aug. 24.

“I am very sorry I did not ask Morritt for a copy of his work on the situation of ancient Troy. You must know that he has a brother, one of the hugest great fat men you ever saw; and as the elder brother is called ‘Troy’ Morritt, the other goes by the name of ‘Avoirdupois’ Morritt. Damned fair for the provinces!

“. . . The perfidy of the Arch-fiend* to Lambton! . . . He gave Powlett a history of the peerage as told by Lambton himself to Brougham. Says Lambton:—‘I directed my auditor to wait upon Ld. Lansdowne, and to make that claim which I thought I had a perfect right to, of being made a peer. But Stephenson refused to execute this commission.’—‘When,’ said Brougham [to Powlett], ‘Lambton opened the case and his claims to me, I thought it but fair to give him my honest opinion that he had none—that he had only his own seat in Parliament—that he took little or no part in debates, and that, in short, his claim was wholly untenable.’ Now whether all or any or what part of all this is fiction, I know not; but was there ever such a perfidious monster as this Bruffam, or such an insolent jackanapes as this Lambton. The latter, I flatter myself, is diddled, tho’ he did return from Paris to be present, with myself, at Canning’s funeral. I was rather ashamed to see my name upon such an occasion and in such a crew.†

“Well now, tho’ somewhat late, my Portuguese Marshal—Lord Beresford—came to dinner on Sunday, and was off before breakfast yesterday [Thursday]. I can safely say that in my life I never took so strong a prejudice against a man. Such a low-looking ruffian in his air, with damned bad manners, or rather none at all, and a vulgarity in his expressions and pronunciation that made me at once believe he was as ignorant, stupid and illiterate as he was ill-looking. Yet somehow or other he almost wiped away all these

* Brougham.

† Mr. Creevey was not at the funeral, though reported to be so in the papers.

1827.]LOWTHER CASTLE.127
notches before we parted. In the first place, it is with me an invaluable property in any man to have him call a spade a spade. The higher he is in station the more rare and the more entertaining it is. Then I defy any human being to find out that he is either a marshal or a lord; but you do find out that he has been in every part of the world, and in all the interesting scenes of it for the last five and thirty years. . . . The history of these two Beresfords is really interesting. They are natural sons of old Lord Waterford,* and were sent over in their infancy to a school at Catterick Bridge under the names of John Poo [Poer?] (the Admiral) and William Carr (the Marshal), and they kept these names till they were about 12 years old. . . . They are still in ignorance of who their mother was, or whether they had the same; but from the secrecy upon this head, from their being sent from Ireland, and, above all, from Lady Waterford having seemed always to shew more affection to them than to her own children, there is a notion they were hers before her marriage.”