hen 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 little
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.

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 Recamier 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. Recamier--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 o