almost exclusively among men and women of rank; his
life, in the most expressive sense of the word, West End; and even in that
West End, his chief haunt St James's Street. Parliament and the Clubs
divided his day, and often his night. The brilliant roues, the steady
gamesters, the borough venders, and the lordly ex-members of ex-cabinets,
were the only population of whose living and breathing he suffered himself
to have any cognizance. In reverse of Gray's learned mouse, eating its way
through the folios of an ancient library--and to whom

"A river or a sea was but a dish of tea,
And a kingdom bread and butter,"

to George Selwyn, the world and all that it inhabits, were concentrated in
Charles Fox, William Pitt, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the circle of
men of pleasantry, loose lives, and vivacious temperaments, who, with
whatever diminishing lustre, revolved round them.

Of the City of London, Selwyn probably had heard; for though fixed to one
spot, he was a man fond of collecting curious knowledge; but nothing short
of proof positive can ever convince us that he had passed Temple Bar. He,
of course, knew that there were such things on the globe as merchants and
traders, because their concerns were occasionally talked of in "the House,"
where, however, he heard as little as possible about them; for in the
debates of the time he took no part but that of a listener, and even then
he abridged the difficulty, by generally sleeping through the sitting. He
was supposed to be the only rival of Lord North in the happy faculty of
falling into a sound slumber at the moment when any of those dreary
persons, who chiefly speak on such subjects, was on his legs. St James's,
and the talk of St James's, were his business, his pleasures, the exciters
of his wit, and the rewarders of his toil. He had applied the art of
French cookery to the rude material of the world, and refined and reduced
all things into a _sauce piquante_--all its realities were concentrated in
essences; and, disdaining the grosser tastes of mankind, he lived upon the
_aroma_ of high life--an epicure even among epicures; yet not an indolent
enjoyer of the luxuries of his condition, but a keen, restless, and eager
_student_ of pleasurable sensations--an Apicius, polished by the manners,
and furnished with the arts of the most self-enjoying condition of mankind,
that of an English gentleman of fortune in the 18th century.

We certainly are not the champions