I have heard, at times, of maiden ladies of a certain age who found pleasure in the affection of ’spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedge-hogs, newts, and in live worms.’ I frequently meet ladies who think conversation lacks interest without the recital of ’melancholy deaths,’ ‘fatal diseases,’ and ‘mournful cases;’ on ne dispute pas les goûts, and certainly the taste for the night side of nature seems immensely prevalent among the lower orders in whom, perhaps, the terrible only can rouse from a sullen insensibility. What happy people! I always think to myself, when I hear of the huge attendance on the last tragic performance at Newgate; how very little they can see of mournful and horrible in common life, if they seek it out so eagerly, and relish it so thoroughly, when they find it! I don’t know; for my own part, gaudeamus. I have always thought that the text, ’Blessed are they that mourn,’ referred to the inner private life, not to a perpetual display of sackcloth and ashes; but I know not. I can understand the weeping-willow taste among people, who have too little wit or too little Christianity to be cheerful, but it is a wonder to find the luxury of gloom united to the keenest perception of the laughable in such a man as George Selwyn.

If human beings could be made pets, like Miss Tabitha’s snake or toad, Selwyn would have fondled a hangman. He loved the noble art of execution, and was a connoisseur of the execution of the art. In childhood he must have decapitated his rocking-horse, hanged his doll in a miniature gallows, and burnt his baubles at mimic stakes. The man whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced and only that ever did announce it the flashing wit within the mind, by a gay crowd of loungers at Arthur’s, might be found next day rummaging among coffins in a damp vault, glorying in a mummy, confessing and preparing a live criminal, paying any sum for a relic of a dead one, or pressing eagerly forward to witness the dying agonies of a condemned man.

Yet Walpole and Warner both bore the highest testimony to the goodness of his heart; and it is impossible to doubt that his nature was as gentle as a woman’s. There have been other instances of even educated men delighting in scenes of suffering; but in general their characters have been more or less gross, their heads more or less insensible. The husband of Madame Recamier went daily to see the guillotine do its vile work during the reign of Terror; but then he was a man who never wept over the death of a friend. The man who was devoted to a little child, whom he adopted and treated with the tenderest care, was very different from M. Recamier and that he had a heart there is no doubt. He was an anomaly, and famous for being so; though, perhaps, his well-known eccentricity was taken advantage of by his witty friends, and many a story fathered on Selwyn which has no origin but in the brain of its narrator.

George Augustus Selwyn, then, famous for his wit, and notorious for his love of horrors, was the second son of a country gentleman, of Matson, in Gloucestershire, Colonel John Selwyn, who had been an aide-de-camp of Marlborough’s, and afterwards a frequenter of the courts of the first two Georges. He inherited his wit chiefly from his mother, Mary, the daughter of General Farington or Farringdon, of the county of Kent. Walpole tells us that she figured among the beauties of the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and was bedchamber-woman to Queen Caroline. Her character was not spotless, for we hear of an intrigue, which her own mistress imparted in confidence to the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of the Regent: they wrote on her tomb Cy gist l’oisivete, because idleness is the mother of all vice), and which eventually found its way into the ‘Utrecht Gazette.’ It was Mrs. Selwyn, too, who said to George II., that he was the last person she would ever have an intrigue with, because she was sure he would tell the queen of it: it was well known that that very virtuous sovereign made his wife the confidante of his amours, which was even more shameless than young De Sevigne’s taking advice from his mother on his intrigue with Ninon de l’Enclos. She seems to have been reputed a wit, for Walpole retails her mots as if they were worth it, but they are not very remarkable: for instance, when Miss Pelham lost a pair of diamond earrings, which she had borrowed, and tried to faint when the loss was discovered, some one called for lavender-drops as a restorative. ‘Pooh!’ cries Mrs. Selwyn, ‘give her diamond-drops.’

George Augustus was born on the 11th of August, 1719. Walpole says that he knew him at eight years old, and as the two were at Eton about the same time, it is presumed that they were contemporaries there. In fact, a list of the boys there, in 1732, furnished to Eliot Warburton, contains the names of Walpole, Selwyn, Edgecumbe, and Conway, all in after-life intimate friends and correspondents. From Eton to Oxford was the natural course, and George was duly entered at Hertford College. He did not long grace Alma Mater, for the grand tour had to be made, and London life to be begun, but he was there long enough to contract the usual Oxford debts, which his father consented to pay more than once. It is amusing to find the son getting Dr. Newton to write him a contrite and respectful letter to the angry parent, to liquidate the ’small accounts’ accumulated in London and Oxford as early as 1740. Three years later we find him in Paris, leading a gay life, and writing respectful letters to England for more money. Previously to this, however, he had obtained, through his father, the sinecure of Clerk of the Irons and surveyor of the Meltings at the Mint, a comfortable little appointment, the duties of which were performed by deputy, while its holder contented himself with honestly acknowledging the salary, and dining once a week, when in town, with the officers of the Mint, and at the Government’s expense.

So far the young gentleman went on well enough, but in 1744 he returned to England, and his rather rampant character showed itself in more than one disgraceful affair.

Among the London shows was Orator Henley, a clergyman and clergyman’s son, and a member of St. John’s, Cambridge. He had come to London about this time, and instituted a series of lectures on universal knowledge and primitive Christianity. He styled himself a Rationalist, a title then more honourable than it is now; and in grandiloquent language, ‘spouted’ on religious subjects to an audience admitted at a shilling a-head. On one occasion he announced a disputation among any two of his hearers, offering to give an impartial hearing and judgment to both. Selwyn and the young Lord Carteret were prepared, and stood up, the one to defend the ignorance, the other the impudence, of Orator Henley himself; so, at least, it is inferred from a passage in D’Israeli the Elder. The uproar that ensued can well be imagined. Henley himself made his escape by a back door. His pulpit, all gilt, has been immortalized by Pope, as ‘Henley’s gilt tub;’ in which

’Imbrown’d with native bronze, lo! Henley stands,
Tuning his voice and balancing his hands.’

The affair gave rise to a correspondence between the Orator and his young friends; who, doubtless, came off best in the matter.

This was harmless enough, but George’s next freak was not so excusable. The circumstances of this affair are narrated in a letter from Captain Nicholson, his friend, to George Selwyn; and may, therefore, be relied on. It appears that being at a certain club in Oxford, at a wine party with his friends, George sent to a certain silversmith’s for a certain chalice, intrusted to the shopkeeper from a certain church to be repaired in a certain manner. This being brought, Master George then, be it remembered, not at the delicate and frivolous age of most Oxford boys, but at the mature one of six-and-twenty filled it with wine, and handing it round, used the sacred words, ’Drink this in remembrance of me.’ This was a blasphemous parody of the most sacred rite of the Church. All Selwyn could say for himself was, that he was drunk when he did it. The other plea, that he did it in ridicule of the transubstantiation of the Romish Church, could not stand at all; and was most weakly put forward. Let Oxford Dons be what they will; let them put a stop to all religious inquiry, and nearly expel Adam Smith for reading Hume’s ‘Essay on Human Nature;’ let them be, as many allege, narrow-minded, hypocritical, and ignorant; we cannot charge them with wrong-dealing in expelling the originator of such open blasphemy, which nothing can be found to palliate, and of which its perpetrator did not appear to repent, rather complaining that the treatment of the Dons was harsh. The act of expulsion was, of course, considered in the same light by his numerous acquaintance, many of whom condoled with him on the occasion. It is true, the Oxford Dons are often charged with injustice and partiality, and too often the evidence is not sufficiently strong to excuse their judgments; but in this the evidence was not denied; only a palliative was put in, which every one can see through. The only injustice we can discover in this case is, that the head of Hart Hall, as Hertford College was called, seemed to have been influenced in pronouncing his sentence of expulsion by certain previous suspicions, having no bearing on the question before him, which had been entertained by another set of tutors those of Christchurch where Selwyn had many friends, and where, probably enough, he indulged in many collegian’s freaks. This knack of bringing up a mere suspicion, is truly characteristic of the Oxford Don, and since the same Head of this House Dr. Newton acknowledged that Selwyn was, during his Oxford career, neither intemperate, dissolute, nor a gamester, it is fair to give him the advantage of the doubt, that the judgment on the evidence had been influenced by the consideration of ‘suspicions’ of former misdeeds, which had not been proved, perhaps never committed. Knowing the after-life of the man, we can, however, scarcely doubt that George had led a fast life at the University, and given cause for mistrust. But one may ask whether Dons, whose love of drinking, and whose tendency to jest on the most solemn subjects, are well known even in the present day, might not have treated Selwyn less harshly for what was done under the influence of wine? To this we are inclined to reply, that no punishment is too severe for profanation; and that drunkenness is not an excuse, but an aggravation. Selwyn threatened to appeal, and took advice on the matter. This, as usual, was vain. Many an expelled man, more unjustly treated than Selwyn, has talked of appeal in vain. Appeal to whom? To what? Appeal against men who never acknowledge themselves wrong, and who, to maintain that they are right, will listen to evidence which they can see is contradictory, and which they know to be worthless! An appeal from an Oxford decision is as hopeless in the present day as it was in Selwyn’s. He wisely left it alone, but less wisely insisted on reappearing in Oxford, against the advice of all his friends, whose characters were lost if the ostracised man were seen among them.

From this time he entered upon his ‘profession,’ that of a wit, gambler, club-lounger, and man about town; for these many characters are all mixed in the one which is generally called ‘a wit.’ Let us remember that he was good-hearted, and not ill-intentioned, though imbued with the false ideas of his day. He was not a great man, but a great wit.

The localities in which the trade of wit was plied were, then, the clubs, and the drawing-rooms of fashionable beauties. The former were in Selwyn’s youth still limited in the number of their members, thirty constituting a large club; and as the subscribers were all known to one another, presented an admirable field for display of mental powers in conversation. In fact, the early clubs were nothing more than dining-societies, precisely the same in theory as our breakfasting arrangements at Oxford, which were every whit as exclusive, though not balloted for. The ballot, however, and the principle of a single black ball suffering to negative an election were not only, under such circumstances, excusable, but even necessary for the actual preservation of peace. Of course, in a succession of dinner-parties, if any two members were at all opposed to one other, the awkwardness would be intolerable. In the present day, two men may belong to the same club and scarcely meet even on the stairs, oftener than once or twice in a season.

Gradually, however, in the place of the ’feast of reason and flow of soul’ and wine, instead of the evenings spent in toasting, talking, emptying bottles and filling heads, as in the case of the old Kit-kat, men took to the monstrous amusement of examining fate, and on club-tables the dice rattled far more freely than the glasses, though these latter were not necessarily abandoned. Then came the thirst for hazard that brought men early in the day to try their fortune, and thus made the club-room a lounge. Selwyn was an habitual frequenter of Brookes.’

Brookes’ was, perhaps, the principal club of the day, though ’White’s Chocolate House’ was almost on a par with it. But Selwyn did not confine his attention solely to this club. It was the fashion to belong to as many of them as possible, and Wilberforce mentions no less than five to which he himself belonged: Brookes’, Boodle’s, White’s, Miles and Evans’s in New Palace Yard, and Goosetree’s. As their names imply, these were all, originally, mere coffee-houses, kept by men of the above names. One or two rooms then sufficed for the requirements of a small party, and it was not till the members were greatly increased that the coffee-house rose majestically to the dignity of a bow-window, and was entirely and exclusively appropriated to the requirements of the club.

This was especially the case with White’s, of which so many of the wits and talkers of Selwyn’s day were members. Who does not know that bow-window at the top of St. James’s Street, where there are sure, about three or four in the afternoon, to be at least three gentlemen, two old and one young, standing, to the exclusion of light within, talking and contemplating the oft-repeated movement outside. White’s was established as early as 1698, and was thus one of the original coffee-houses. It was then kept by a man named Arthur: here Chesterfield gamed and talked, to be succeeded by Gilly Williams. Charles Townshend, and George Selwyn. The old house was burnt down in 1733. It was at White’s or as Hogarth calls it in his pictorial squib, Black’s that, when a man fell dead at the door, he was lugged in and bets made as to whether he was dead or no. The surgeon’s operations were opposed, for fear of disturbing the bets. Here, too, did George Selwyn and Charles Townshend pit their wit against wit; and here Pelham passed all the time he was not forced to devote to politics. In short it was, next to Brookes’, the club of the day, and perhaps in some respects had a greater renown than even that famous club, and its play was as high.

In Brookes’ and White’s Selwyn appeared with a twofold fame, that of a pronouncer of bon-mots and that of a lover of horrors. His wit was of the quaintest order. He was no inveterate talker, like Sydney Smith; no clever dissimulator, like Mr. Hook. Calmly, almost sanctimoniously, he uttered those neat and telling sayings which the next day passed over England as ‘Selwyn’s last.’ Walpole describes his manner admirably his eyes turned up, his mouth set primly, a look almost of melancholy in his whole face. Reynolds, in his Conversation-piece, celebrated when in the Strawberry Collection, and representing Selwyn leaning on a chair, Gilly Williams, crayon in hand, and Dick Edgecumbe by his side, has caught the pseudo-solemn expression of his face admirably. The ease of the figure, one hand empochee, the other holding a paper of epigrams, or what not, the huge waistcoat with a dozen buttons and huge flaps, the ruffled sleeve, the bob-wig, all belong to the outer man; but the calm, quiet, almost enquiring face, the look half of melancholy, half of reproach, and, as the Milesian would say, the other half of sleek wisdom; the long nose, the prim mouth and joined lips, the elevated brow, and beneath it the quiet contemplative eye, contemplative not of heaven or hell, but of this world as it had seen it, in its most worldly point of view, yet twinkling with a flashing thought of incongruity made congruous, are the indices of the inner man. Most of our wits, it must have been seen, have had some other interest and occupation in life than that of ’making wit:’ some have been authors, some statesmen, some soldiers, some wild-rakes, and some players of tricks: Selwyn had no profession but that of diseur de bons mots; for though he sat in the House, ne took no prominent part in politics; though he gambled extensively, he did not game for the sake of money only. Thus his life was that merely of a London bachelor, with few incidents to mark it, and therefore his memoir must resolve itself more or less into a series of anecdotes of his eccentricities and list of his witticisms.

His friend Walpole gives us an immense number of both, not all of a first-rate nature, nor many interesting in the present day. Selwyn, calm as he was, brought out his sayings on the spur of the moment, and their appropriateness to the occasion was one of their greatest recommendations. A good saying, like a good sermon, depends much on its delivery, and loses much in print. Nothing less immortal than wit! To take first, however, the eccentricities of his character, and especially his love of horrors, we find anecdotes by the dozen retailed of him. It was so well known, that Lord Holland, when dying, ordered his servant to be sure to admit Mr. Selwyn if he called to enquire after him, ’for if I am alive,’ said he, ’I shall be glad to see him, and if I am dead, he will be glad to see me.’ The name of Holland leads us to an anecdote told by Walpole. Selwyn was looking over Cornbury with Lord Abergavenny and Mrs. Frere, ‘who loved one another a little,’ and was disgusted with the frivolity of the woman who could take no interest in anything worth seeing. ‘You don’t know what you missed in the other room,’ he cried at last, peevishly. ’Why, what?’ ’Why, my Lord Holland’s picture.’ ’Well, what is my Lord Holland to me?’ ‘Don’t you know,’ whispered the wit mysteriously, ’that Lord Holland’s body lies in the same vault in Kensington Church with my Lord Abergavenny’s mother?’ ’Lord! she was so obliged,’ says Walpole, ‘and thanked him a thousand times!’

Selwyn knew the vaults as thoroughly as old Anthony Wood knew the brasses. The elder Craggs had risen by the favour of Marlborough, whose footman he had been, and his son was eventually a Secretary of State. Arthur Moore, the father of James Moore Smyth, of whom Pope wrote

’Arthur, whose giddy son neglects the laws,
Imputes to me and my damned works the cause’

had worn a livery too. When Craggs got into a coach with him, he exclaimed, ‘Why, Arthur, I am always getting up behind, are not you?’ Walpole having related this story to Selwyn, the latter told him, as a most important communication, that Arthur Moore had had his coffin chained to that of his mistress. ‘Lord! how do you know?’ asked Horace. ‘Why, I saw them the other day in a vault at St. Giles’s.’ ’Oh! Your servant, Mr. Selwyn,’ cried the man who showed the tombs at Westminster Abbey, ’I expected to see you here the other day when the old Duke of Richmond’s body was taken up.’

Criminals were, of course, included in his passion. Walpole affirms that he had a great share in bringing Lord Dacre’s footman, who had murdered the butler, to confess his crime. In writing the confession, the ingenious plush coolly stopped and asked how ‘murdered’ was spelt. But it mattered little to George whether the criminal were alive or dead, and he defended his eccentric taste with his usual wit; when rallied by some women for going to see the Jacobite Lord Lovat’s head cut off, he retorted, sharply ’I made full amends, for I went to see it sewn on again.’ He had indeed done so, and given the company at the undertaker’s a touch of his favourite blasphemy, for when the man of coffins had done his work and laid the body in its box, Selwyn, imitating the voice of the Lord Chancellor at the trial, muttered, ’My Lord Lovat, you may rise.’ He said a better thing on the trial of a confederate of Lovat’s, that Lord Kilmarnock, with whom the ladies fell so desperately in love as he stood on his defence. Mrs. Bethel, who was famous for a hatchet-face, was among the fair spectators: ‘What a shame it is,’ quoth the wit, ’to turn her face to the prisoners before they are condemned!’ Terrible, indeed, was that instrument of death to those men, who had in the heat of battle so gallantly met sword and blunderbuss. The slow, sure approach of the day of the scaffold was a thousand times worse than the roar of cannon. Lord Cromarty was pardoned, solely, it was said, from pity for his poor wife, who was at the time of the trial far advanced in pregnancy. It was affirmed that the child born had a distinct mark of an axe on his neck. Credat Judaeus! Walpole used to say that Selwyn never thought but a la tete tranchee, and that when he went to have a tooth drawn, he told the dentist he would drop his handkerchief by way of signal. Certain it is that he did love an execution, whatever he or his friends may have done to remove the impression of this extraordinary taste. Some better men than Selwyn have had the same, and Macaulay accuses Penn of a similar affection. The best known anecdote of Selwyn’s peculiarity relates to the execution of Damiens, who was torn with red-hot pincers, and finally quartered by four horses, for the attempt to assassinate Louis XV. On the day fixed, George mingled with the crowd plainly dressed, and managed to press forward close to the place of torture. The executioner observing him, eagerly cried out, ’Faîtes place pour Monsieur; c’est un Anglais et un amateur;’ or, as another version goes, he was asked if he was not himself a bourreau. ’Non, Monsieur,’ he is said to have answered, ‘je n’ai pas cet honneur, je ne suis qu’un amateur.’ The story is more than apocryphal, for Selwyn is not the only person of whom it has been told; and he was even accused, according to Wraxall, of going to executions in female costume. George Selwyn must have passed as a ‘remarkably fine woman,’ in that case.

It is only justice to him to say that the many stories of his attending executions were supposed to be inventions of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, another wit, and of Chesterfield, another, and a rival. In confirmation, it is adduced that when the former had been relating some new account, and an old friend of Selwyn’s expressed his surprise that he had never heard the tale before, the hero of it replied quietly, ’No wonder at all, for Sir Charles has just invented it, and knows that I will not by contradiction spoil the pleasure of the company he is so highly entertaining.’

Wit has been called ‘the eloquence of indifference;’ no one seems ever to have been so indifferent about everything, but his little daughter, as George Selwyn. He always, however, took up the joke, and when asked why he had not been to see one Charles Fox, a low criminal, hanged at Tyburn, answered, quietly, ’I make a point of never going to rehearsals.’

Selwyn’s love for this kind of thing, to believe his most intimate friend, Horace Walpole, was quite a fact. His friend relates that he even bargained for the High Sheriff’s wand, after it was broken, at the condemnation of the gallant Lords, but said, ’that he behaved so like an attorney the first day, and so like a pettifogger the second, that he would not take it to light his fire with.’

The State Trials, of course, interested George more than any other in his eventless life; he dined after the sentence with the celebrated Lady Townshend, who was so devoted to Lord Kilmarnock

’Pitied by gentle minds, Kilmarnock died’ Johnson.

that she is said to have even stayed under his windows, when he was in prison; but he treated her anxiety with such lightness that the lady burst into tears, and ‘flung up-stairs.’ ‘George,’ writes Walpole to Montague, ’cooly took Mrs. Dorcas, her woman, and bade her sit down to finish the bottle. “And pray,” said Dorcas, “do you think my lady will be prevailed upon to let me go and see the execution? I have a friend that has promised to take care of me, and I can lie in the Tower the night before.” Could she have talked so pleasantly to Selwyn?’

His contemporaries certainly believed in his love for Newgatism; for when Walpole had caught a housebreaker in a neighbour’s area, he immediately despatched a messenger to White’s for the philo-criminalist, who was sure to be playing at the Club any time before daylight. It happened that the drawer at the ‘Chocolate-house’ had been himself lately robbed, and therefore stole to George with fear and trembling, and muttered mysteriously to him, ’Mr. Walpole’s compliments, and he has got a housebreaker for you.’ Of course Selwyn obeyed the summons readily, and the event concluded, as such events do nine times out of ten, with a quiet capture, and much ado about nothing.

The Selwyns were a powerful family in Gloucestershire, owning a great deal of property in the neighbourhood of Gloucester itself. The old colonel had represented that city in Parliament for many years. On the 5th of November, 1751, he died. His eldest son had gone a few months before him. This son had been also at Eton, and was an early friend of Horace Walpole and General Conway. His death left George sole heir to the property, and very much he seemed to have needed the heritage.

The property of the Selwyns lay in the picturesque district of the Northern Cotswolds. Anybody who has passed a day in the dull city of Gloucester, which seems to break into anything like life only at an election, lying dormant in the intervals, has been glad to rush out to enjoy air and a fine view on Robin Hood’s Hill, a favourite walk with the worthy citizens, though what the jovial archer of merry Sherwood had to do with it, or whether he was ever in Gloucestershire at all, I profess I know not. Walpole describes the hill with humorous exaggeration. ’It is lofty enough for an alp, yet is a mountain of turf to the very top, has wood scattered all over it, springs that long to be cascades in many places of it, and from the summit it beats even Sir George Littleton’s views, by having the city of Gloucester at its foot, and the Severn widening to the horizon.’ On the very summit of the next hill, Chosen-down, is a solitary church, and the legend saith that the good people who built it did so originally at the foot of the steep mount, but that the Virgin Mary carried up the stones by night, till the builder, in despair, was compelled to erect it on the top. Others attribute the mysterious act to a very different personage, and with apparently more reason, for the position of the church must keep many an old sinner from hearing service.

At Matson, then, on Robin Hood’s Hill, the Selwyns lived; Walpole says that the ’house is small, but neat. King Charles lay here at the seige, and the Duke of York, with typical fury, hacked and hewed the window-shutters of his chamber as a memorandum of his being there. And here is the very flowerpot and counterfeit association for which Bishop Sprat was taken up, and the Duke of Marlborough sent to the Tower. The reservoirs on the hill supply the city. The late Mr. Selwyn governed the borough by them and I believe by some wine too.’ Probably, or at least by some beer, if the modern electors be not much altered from their forefathers.

Besides this important estate, the Selwyns had another at Ludgershall, and their influence there was so complete, that they might fairly be said to give one seat to any one they chose. With such double barrels George Selwyn was, of course, a great gun in the House, but his interest lay far more in piquet and pleasantry than in politics and patriotism, and he was never fired off with any but the blank cartridges of his two votes. His parliamentary career, begun in 1747, lasted more than forty years, yet was entirely without distinction. He, however, amused both parties with his wit, and by snoring in unison with Lord North. This must have been trying to Mr. Speaker Cornwall, who was longing, no doubt, to snore also, and dared not. He was probably the only Speaker who presided over so august an assembly as our English Parliament with a pewter pot of porter at his elbow, sending for more and more to Bellamy’s till his heavy eyes closed of themselves. A modern M.P., carried back by some fancies to ‘the Senate’ of those days, might reasonably doubt whether his guide had not taken him by mistake to some Coal-hole or Cider-cellar, presided over by some former Baron Nicholson, and whether the furious eloquence of Messrs. Fox, Pitt, and Burke were not got up for the amusement of an audience admitted at sixpence a head.

Selwyn’s political jokes were the delight of Bellamy’s! He said that Fox and Pitt reminded him of Hogarth’s Idle and Industrious Apprentices. When asked by some one, as he sauntered out of the house ’Is the House up?’ he replied; ‘No, but Burke is.’ The length of Burke’s elaborate spoken essays was proverbial, and obtained for him the name of the ‘Dinner-bell.’ Fox was talking one day at Brookes’ of the advantageous peace he had made with France, and that he had even induced that country to give up the gum trade to England. ‘That, Charles,’ quoth Selwyn, sharply, ’I am not at all surprised at; for having drawn your teeth, they would be d d fools to quarrel with you about gums.’ Fox was often the object of his good-natured satire. As every one knows, his boast was to be called ‘The Man of the People,’ though perhaps he cared as little for the great unwashed as for the wealth and happiness of the waiters at his clubs.’ Every one knows, too, what a dissolute life he led for many years. Selwyn’s sleepiness was well known. He slept in the House; he slept, after losing L8oo ‘and with as many more before him,’ upon the gaming-table, with the dice-box ‘stamped close to his ears;’ he slept, or half-slept, even in conversation, which he seems to have caught by fits and starts. Thus it was that words he heard suggested different senses, partly from being only dimly associated with the subject on the tapis. So, when, they were talking around of the war, and whether it should be a sea war or a Continent war, Selwyn woke up just enough to say, ‘I am for a sea war and a Continent admiral.’

When Fox had ruined himself, and a subscription for him was talked of, some one asked how they thought ‘he would take it.’ ’Take it,’ cried Selwyn, suddenly lighting up, ‘why, quarterly to be sure.’

His parliamentary career was then quite uneventful; but at the dissolution in 1780, he found that his security at Gloucester was threatened. He was not Whig enough for that constituency, and had throughout supported the war with America. He offered himself, of course, but was rejected with scorn, and forced to fly for a seat to Ludgershall. Walpole writes to Lady Ossory: ‘They’ (the Gloucester people) ‘hanged him in effigy, and dressed up a figure of Mie-Mie’ (his adopted daughter), ’and pinned on its breast these words, alluding to the gallows: “This is what I told you you would come to!"’ From Gloucester he went to Ludgershall, where he was received by ringing of bells and bonfires. ‘Being driven out of my capital,’ said he, ’and coming into that country of turnips, where I was adored, I seemed to be arrived in my Hanoverian dominions’ no bad hit at George II. For Ludgershall he sat for many years, with Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, whose ‘Memoirs’ are better known than trusted, as colleague. That writer says of Selwyn, that he was ’thoroughly well versed in our history, and master of many curious as well as secret anecdotes, relative to the houses of Stuart and Brunswick.’

Another bon-mot, not in connection with politics, is reported by Walpole as incomparable.’ Lord George Gordon asked him if the Ludgershall electors would take him (Lord George) for Ludgershall, adding, ’if you would recommend me, they would choose me, if I came from the coast of Africa.’ ’That is according to what part of the coast you came from; they would certainly, if you came from the Guinea coast.’ ‘Now, Madam,’ writes his friend, ’is not this true inspiration as well as true wit? Had any one asked him in which of the four quarters of the world Guinea is situated, could he have told?’ Walpole did not perhaps know master George thoroughly he was neither so ignorant nor so indifferent as he seemed. His manner got him the character of being both; but he was a still fool that ran deep.

Though Selwyn did little with his two votes, he made them pay; and in addition to the post in the Mint, got out of the party he supported those of Registrar to the Court of Chancery in the Island of Barbadoes, a sinecure done by deputy, Surveyor of the Crown Lands, and Paymaster to the Board of Works. The wits of White’s added the title of ‘Receiver-General of Waif and Stray Jokes.’ It is said that his hostility to Sheridan arose from the latter having lost him the office in the Works in 1782, when Burke’s Bill for reducing the Civil List came into operation; but this is not at all probable, as his dislike was shown long before that period. Apropos of the Board of Works, Walpole gives another anecdote. On one occasion, in 1780, Lord George Gordon had been the only opponent on a division. Selwyn afterwards took him in his carriage to White’s. ‘I have brought,’ said he, ’the whole Opposition in my coach, and I hope one coach will always hold them, if they mean to take away the Board of Works.’

Undoubtedly, Selwyn’s wit wanted the manner of the man to make it so popular, for, as we read it, it is often rather mild. To string a list of them together: Lady Coventry showed him her new dress all covered with spangles as large as shillings. ‘Bless my soul,’ said he, ’you’ll be change for a guinea.’

Fox, debtor and bankrupt as he was, had taken lodgings with Fitzpatrick at an oilman’s in Piccadilly. Every one pitied the landlord, who would certainly be ruined. ‘Not a bit of it,’ quoth George; ’he’ll have the credit of keeping at his house the finest pickles in London.’

Sometimes there was a good touch of satire on his times. When ’High Life Below Stairs’ was first acted, Selwyn vowed he would go and see it, for he was sick of low life above stairs; and when a waiter at his Club had been convicted of felony, ‘What a horrid idea,’ said he, ’the man will give of us in Newgate!’

Dining with Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, he heard him say, in answer to a question about musical instruments in the East, ’I believe I saw one lyre there.’ ’Ay,’ whispered the wit to his neighbour, ’and there’s one less since he left the country.’ Bruce shared the travellers’ reputation of drawing the long-bow to a very considerable extent.

Two of Selwyn’s best mots were about one of the Foley family, who were so deeply in debt that they had ‘to go to Texas,’ or Boulogne, to escape the money-lenders. ‘That,’ quoth Selwyn, ’is a pass-over which will not be much relished by the Jews.’ And again, when it was said that they would be able to cancel their father’s old will by a new-found one, he profanely indulged in a pun far too impious to be repeated in our day, however it may have been relished in Selwyn’s time.

A picture called ‘The Daughter of Pharaoh’ in which the Princess Royal and her attendant ladies figured as the saver of Moses and her handmaids, was being exhibited in 1782, at a house opposite Brookes’, and was to be the companion-piece to Copley’s ‘Death of Chatham.’ George said he could recommend a better companion, to wit the ’Sons of Pharaoh’ at the opposite house. It is scarcely necessary to explain that pharaoh or faro was the most popular game of hazard then played.

Walking one day with Lord Pembroke, and being besieged by a troop of small chimney-climbers, begging Selwyn, after bearing their importunity very calmly for some time, suddenly turned round, and with the most serious face thus addressed them ’I have often heard of the sovereignty of the people; I suppose your highnesses are in Court mourning,’ We can well imagine the effect of this sedate speech on the astonished youngsters.

Pelham’s truculency was well known. Walpole and his friend went to the sale of his plate in 1755. ‘Lord,’ said the wit, ’how many toads have been eaten off these plates!’

The jokes were not always very delicate. When, in the middle of the summer of 1751, Lord North, who had been twice married before, espoused the widow of the Earl of Rockingham, who was fearfully stout, Selwyn suggested that she had been kept in ice for three days before the wedding. So, too, when there was talk of another embonpoint personage going to America during the war, he remarked that she would make a capital breast-work.

One of the few epigrams he ever wrote if not the only one, of which there is some doubt was in the same spirit. It is on the discovery of a pair of shoes in a certain lady’s bed

Well may Suspicion shake its head
Well may Clorinda’s spouse be jealous,
When the dear wanton takes to bed
Her very shoes because they’re fellows.

Such are a few specimens of George Selwyn’s wit; and dozens more are dispersed though Walpole’s Letters. As Eliot Warburton remarks, they do not give us a very high idea of the humour of the period; but two things must be taken into consideration before we deprecate their author’s title to the dignity and reputation he enjoyed so abundantly among his contemporaries; they are not necessarily the best specimens that might have been given, if more of his mots had been preserved; and their effect on his listeners depended more on the manner of delivery than on the matter. That they were improvised and unpremeditated is another important consideration. It is quite unfair to compare them, as Warburton does, with the hebdomadal trash of ‘Punch,’ though perhaps they would stand the comparison pretty well. It is one thing to force wit with plenty of time to invent and meditate it another to have so much wit within you that you can bring it out on any occasion; one thing to compose a good fancy for money another to utter it only when it flashes through the brain.

But it matters little what we in the present day may think of Selwyn’s wit, for conversation is spoiled by bottling, and should be drawn fresh when wanted. Selwyn’s companions all men of wit, more or less, affirmed him to be the most amusing man of his day, and that was all the part he had to play. No real wit ever hopes to talk for posterity; and written wit is of a very different character to the more sparkling, if less solid, creations of a moment.

We have seen Selwyn in many points of view, not all very creditable to him; first, expelled from Oxford for blasphemy; next, a professed gambler and the associate of men who led fashion in those days, it is true, but then it was very bad fashion; then as a lover of hangmen, a wit and a lounger. There is reason to believe that Selwyn, though less openly reprobate than many of his associates, was, in his quiet way, just as bad as any of them, if we except the Duke of Queensberry, his intimate friend, or the disgusting ‘Franciscans’ of Medmenham Abbey, of whom, though not the founder, nor even a member, he was, in a manner, the suggester in his blasphemy.

But Selwyn’s real character is only seen in profile in all these accounts. He had at the bottom of such vice, to which his position, and the fashion of the day introduced him, a far better heart than any of his contemporaries, and in some respects a kind of simplicity which was endearing. He was neither knave nor fool. He was not a voluptuary, like his friend the duke; nor a continued drunkard, like many other ’fine gentlemen’ with whom he mixed; nor a cheat, though a gambler; nor a sceptic, like his friend Walpole; nor a blasphemer, like the Medmenham set, though he had once parodied profanely a sacred rite; nor was he steeped in debt, as Fox was; nor does he appear to have been a practised seducer, as too many of his acquaintance were. Not that these negative qualities are to his praise; but if we look at the age and the society around him, we must, at least, admit that Selwyn was not one of the worst of that wicked set.

But the most pleasing point in the character of the old bachelor for he was too much of a wit ever to marry is his affection for children not his own. That is, not avowedly his own, for it was often suspected that the little ones he took up so fondly bore some relationship to him, and there can be little doubt that Selwyn, like everybody else in that evil age, had his intrigues. He did not die in his sins, and that is almost all we can say for him. He gave up gaming in time, protesting that it was the bane of four much better things health, money, time, and thinking. For the last two, perhaps, he cared little. Before his death he is said to have been a Christian, which was a decided rarity in the fashionable set of his day. Walpole answered, when asked if he was a Freemason, that he never had been anything, and probably most of the men of the time would, if they had had the honesty, have said the same. They were not atheists professedly, but they neither believed in nor practised Christianity.

His love for children has been called one of his eccentricities. It would be a hard name to give it if he had not been a club-lounger of his day. I have sufficient faith in human nature to trust that two-thirds of the men of this country have that most amiable eccentricity. But in Selwyn it amounted to something more than in the ordinary paterfamilias: it was almost a passion. He was almost motherly in his celibate tenderness to the little ones to whom he took a fancy. This affection he showed to several of the children, sons or daughters, of his friends; but to two especially, Anne Coventry and Maria Fagniani.

The former was the daughter of the beautiful Maria Gunning, who became Countess of Coventry. Nanny, as he called her, was four years old when her mother died, and from that time he treated her almost as his own child.

But Mie-Mie, as the little Italian was called, was far more favoured. Whoever may have been the child’s father, her mother was a rather beautiful and very immoral woman, the wife of the Marchese Fagniani. She seems to have desired to make the most for her daughter out of the extraordinary rivalry of the two English ‘gentlemen,’ and they were admirably taken in by her. Whatever the truth may have been, Selwyn’s love for children showed itself more strongly in this case than in any other; and, oddly enough, it seems to have begun when the little girl was at an age when children scarcely interest other men than their fathers in short, in infancy. Her parents allowed him to have the sole charge of her at a very early age, when they returned to the Continent; but in 1777, the marchioness, being then in Brussels, claimed her daughter back again; though less, it seems, from any great anxiety on the child’s account, than because her husband’s parents, in Milan, objected to their grand-daughter being left in England; and also, not a little, from fear of the voice of Mrs. Grundy. Selwyn seems to have used all kinds of arguments to retain the child; and a long correspondence took place, which the marchesa begins with, ‘My very dear friend,’ and many affectionate expressions, and concludes with a haughty ‘Sir,’ and her opinion that his conduct was ‘devilish.’ The affair was, therefore, clearly a violent quarrel, and Selwyn was obliged at last to give up the child. He had a carriage fitted up for her expressly for her journey; made out for her a list of the best hotels on her route; sent his own confidential man-servant with her, and treasured up among his ‘relics’ the childish little notes, in a large scrawling hand, which Mie-Mie sent him. Still more curious was it to see this complete man of the world, this gambler for many years, this club-lounger, drinker, associate of well-dressed blasphemers, of Franciscans of Medmenham Abbey, devoting, not his money only, but his very time to this mere child, leaving town in the height of the season for dull Matson, that she might have fresh air; quitting his hot club-rooms, his nights spent at the piquet-table, and the rattle of the dice, for the quiet, pleasant terraces of his country-house, where he would hold the little innocent Mie-Mie by her tiny hand, as she looked up into his shrivelled dissipated face; quitting the interchange of wit, the society of the Townshends, the Walpoles, the Williamses, the Edgecumbes; all the jovial, keen wisdom of Gilly, and Dick, and Horace, and Charles, as they called one another, for the meaningless prattle, the merry laughter of this half-English, half-Italian child, It redeems Selwyn in our eyes, and it may have done him real good: nay, he must have felt a keen refreshment in this change from vice to innocence; and we understand the misery he expressed, when the old bachelor’s one little companion and only pure friend was taken away from him. His love for the child was well known in London society; and of it did Sheridan’s friends take advantage, when they wanted to get Selwyn out of Brookes’, to prevent his black-balling the dramatist. The anecdote is given in the next memoir.

In his later days Selwyn still haunted the clubs, hanging about, sleepy, shrivelled, dilapidated in face and figure, yet still respected and dreaded by the youngsters, as the ‘celebrated Mr. Selwyn.’ The wit’s disease gout carried him off at last, in 1791, at the age of seventy-two.

He left a fortune which was not contemptible: L33,000 of it were to go to Mie-Mie by this time a young lady and as the Duke of Queensberry, at his death, left her no less than L150,000, Miss was by no means a bad match for Lord Yarmouth. See what a good thing it is to have three papas, when two of them are rich! The duke made Lord Yarmouth his residuary legatee, and between him and his wife divided nearly half-a-million.

Let us not forget in closing this sketch of George Selwyn’s life, that, gambler and reprobate as he was, he possessed some good traits, among which his love of children appears in shining colours.