George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life | Page 9

a
longer period of parliamentary observation and of personal association
with the leading politicians of the time. But this intimacy with political
personages never impressed him with the importance of political office.
"You will not believe it, perhaps," he once wrote to Lady Carlisle when
he had been asked to meet Pitt at dinner, "but a minister of any
description, though served up in his great shell of power, and all his
green fat about him, is to me a dish by no means relishing, and I never
knew but one in my life I could pass an hour with pleasantly, which
was Lord Holland." Cabinet Ministers of the eighteenth century
belonged to a single section of society, which included every one of

note and every one in it knew their faults and their failings; they were
not afraid of offending constituents or of being lectured in leading
articles. Thus their littleness, rather than their greatness, was apt to
impress a daily observer like Selwyn, and to give to his remarks an
aspect of depreciation and of pessimism.
That Selwyn was a gossip, no one knew better than himself, and he has
incurred the censure of Sir George Trevelyan for repeating tittle-tattle,
as he calls it, about Fox and his gambling. But posterity desires to see
the real Fox, not an ideal statesman--to see a man as he lived, not only
a political figure. Looking back for more than a century we may very
well appreciate to the full Fox's great qualities and yet be aware of his
weaknesses and his vices, in which he showed the strength of a
passionate and virile character in contact with certain characteristics of
the society of the age. Instead, therefore, of blaming Selwyn for
repeating to correspondents the minor incidents of the time, we ought
to be thankful to him for enabling us to picture so many of the leading
personages of that day as they were. If we look to a period before or
after that of Selwyn, we see an immortal gossip in Pepys, and in
Greville another who will be read after the works of eminent historians
have been put on upper shelves as out of date. The detailing of the
minor facts of life without malice and with absolute truth enables
posterity to form a sound judgment on a past age.
Among the amusements of the society in which Selwyn delighted was
one which now seems both morbid and cruel: that of attending the
execution of those condemned to capital punishment. Even to his
friends and immediate successors, no less than to those who have
written of him, the fact that a man so full of kindness, who took
pleasure in the innocent companionship of children, could with positive
eagerness witness the hanging of a thief at Tyburn, has been a cause of
surprise. When one is conversant with the history of the time the
astonishment is ridiculous. The sight of a man on the gallows no more
disturbed the serenity of the most good-natured of men at the end of the
eighteenth century than do the dying flutters of a partridge the
susceptibilities of the most cultured of modern sportsmen. Selwyn was
ever trying to get as much amusement out of life as possible, and he

would have been acting contrary to all the ideas of the fashionable
society of his age if he had sat at home when a criminal was to die. It
was said of Boswell, just as it was of Selwyn, that he was passionately
fond of attending executions. We need not therefore be surprised that
Selwyn did as others of his time. Gilly Williams was a kind and
good-natured man, yet we find him writing to Selwyn:
"Harrington's porter was condemned yesterday. Cadogan and I have
already bespoken places at the Braziers, and I hope Parson Digby will
come time enough to be of the party. I presume we shall have your
honour's company, if your stomach is not too squeamish for a single
serving."
Another friend, Henry St. John, begins a letter to Selwyn by telling
how he and his brother went to see an execution. "We had a full view
of Mr. Waistcott as he went to the gallows with a white cockade in his
hat." Not to be wanting in the ordinary courtesies of the time, Selwyn's
correspondent presently remarks, as one nowadays would do of a day's
grouse-shooting: "I hope you have had good sport at the Place de Greve,
to make up for losing the sight of so notorious a villain as Lady
Harrington's porter. Mais laisons la ce discours triste, and let us talk of
the living and lively world." Selwyn made his world brighter by his wit
and pleasantries, and the sight of an execution did not depress