SELWYN, with brilliant wit and classic taste, combined qualities of a very contradictory nature. With good humour, kindness of heart, and great fondness for children, he united a morbid interest in the details of human suffering, and more especially a taste for witnessing criminal executions. Even frightful details of suicide and murder, the investigation of a disfigured corpse, or an acquaintance in his shroud, afforded him pleasure. When the first Lord Holland was on his deathbed, he was told that his friend Selwyn had called to inquire after his health. "The next time Mr. Selwyn calls," said Lord H., "show him up-if I am alive I shall be delighted to see him, and if I am dead he will be glad to see me."

Selwyn told a friend that Arthur More had had his coffin chained to that of his mistress. "How do you know?"-"Why, I saw them the other day in a vault in St. Giles's."

He was walking in Westminster Abbey with Lord Abergavenny, and met the man who showed the tombs. "Oh! your servant, Mr. Selwyn; I expected to have seen you here the other day, when the old Duke of Richmond's body was taken up."

Walpole having captured a housebreaker, sent to White's for Selwyn: the drawer, who had himself been lately robbed, received the message. He stalked up into the club-room, stopped short, and, in a hollow, trembling voice, said: "Mr. Selwyn, Mr. Walpole's compliments to you, and he has got a housebreaker for you."

Lord Pembroke met Selwyn, on the 1st of May, very much annoyed in the street with chimney-sweepers, who were clamorous,

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surrounded, daubed, and persecuted him; in short, they would not let him go till they had forced money from him. At length he made them a low bow, and cried, Gentlemen, I have often heard of the majesty of the people; I presume your highnesses are in court mourning." This is Hannah More's version." Walpole gives Selwyn's words on meeting the chimney-sweepers wearing their crowns of gilt paper: "We have heard so much lately of the majesty of the people, that I suppose they are taken for the princes of the people, and that this is a Collar-day.'

At the trials of Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino, observing Mrs. Bethel, who had a hatchet-face, looking wistfully at the rebel lords, "What a shame it is," said Selwyn, "to turn her face to the prisoners till they are condemned."

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Some ladies bantering him on his want of feeling, in attending to see Lord Lovat's head cut off, Why," he said, I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it sewn on again." At the undertaker's, after the head had been sewn on, and with the body placed in the coffin, Selwyn, imitating the voice and manner of the Lord Chancellor at the trial, exclaimed, "My Lord Lovat, your lordship may rise."

Alluding to the practice of stage-criminals dropping a handkerchief on the scaffold, as a signal to the executioner to strike, "George," says Walpole, "never thinks but à la tête tranchée. He came to town the other day to have a tooth drawn, and told the man that he would drop his handkerchief for the signal."

He went to Paris purposely to see Damien broken on the wheel, for attempting to assassinate Louis XV.: he got near the scaffold among the crowd, but was repulsed by one of the executioners, who, however, being told of Selwyn's object, caused the people to make way for him, exclaiming, "Faites place pour monsieur; c'est un Anglais, et un amateur."

He delighted in a hoax. Dining with the Mayor and Corporation of Gloucester, in 1758, when news arrived of our expedition having failed before Rochefort, the Mayor, turning to Selwyn, said: "You, sir, who are in the ministerial secrets, can no doubt inform us of the cause of this misfortune?" Selwyn, though utterly ignorant upon the subject, said, "I will tell you in confidence the reason, Mr. Mayor: the fact is, that the scaling-ladders, prepared for the occasion, were found, on trial, to be too short." The Mayor believed this solution, and told it to his friends; though Selwyn was aware that Rochfort lies on the river Charente, some leagues from the seashore, and that our troops had never even effected a landing on the French coast.