GEORGE SELWYN. A Love of Horrors.-Anecdotes of Selwyn's Mother. Selwyn's College Days. -Orator Henley.-Selwyn's Blasphemous Freak.-The Profession of a Wit. The Thirst for Hazard.-Reynolds's Conversation-Piece.-Selwyn's Eccentricities and Witticisms.-A most Important Communication. --An Amateur Headsman.-The Eloquence of Indifference.-Catching a Housebreaker. The Family of the Selwyns.-The Man of the People.--Selwyn's Parliamentary Career.-True Wit.-Some of Selwyn's Witty Sayings.-The Sovereignty of the People.-On two kinds of Wit.-Selwyn's Love for Children. Mie-Mie, the Little Italian.-Selwyn's Little Companion taken from him. His Later Days and Death. 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 disputes 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 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. ! A Love of Horrors. 323 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 Récamier 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. Récamier-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, ak There 324 Anecdotes of Selwyn's Mother. 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'oisiveté, 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 Sévigné'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 x Duite as • good as any in the book of Wits. 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, 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 326 Selwyn's Blasphemous Freak. 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 ali 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 |