“. . . It seems the offer to Stanley which I mentioned has not actually been made yet.* Peel is to be home on the spot, before a single fixed appointment is made. Great homage to him this! . . . I am more and more struck every day with Lord Grey’s happy appearance, and I can’t help making in my own mind the contrast between him and Sefton. In my estimation, Sefton is by no means inferior to the other in natural talents. In conversation he has much more fancy and a much greater variety of talent; and had his mind taken the same direction earlier and received the same cultivation as the other, he, too, would have been a most powerful speaker, tho’ not as eloquent. But this want of early cultivation now ruins him. Lord Grey spends a good part of every day with his book, which Sefton, from want of habit, can’t do, and he is compell’d, therefore, to exist a great part of his time upon excitement from play, cookery, &c., &c. It would do you good to see me send Lord Grey to bed every night at half after eleven o’clock, which is half an hour beyond his usual time. This I do regularly, and it amuses him much. He looks about for his book, calls his dog Viper, and out they go, he having been all day as gay as possible, and not an atom of that gall he was subject to in earlier life. To be sure, when he read a letter this morning at breakfast, stating that the Duke of Gloucester was dangerously ill, he did say:—‘Well, if he dies, all I can say is, he won’t leave a greater fool behind him than himself!’ But how feeble and gentle this compared with the energy of earlier days, when he told
* Stanley was offered office in Peel’s cabinet as soon as Peel returned from Rome. He declined it, on the ground that, however possible he might have found it to serve with Peel, the fact that the Duke of Wellington had first received the King’s commands “must stamp upon the administration about to be formed the impress of his name and principles.” |
| 300 | THE CREEVEY PAPERS | [Ch. XII. |
