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 _empochée_, 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 Judæus_! Walpole used to
say that Selwyn never thought but _à la tête tranchée_, 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, '_Faites 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.