g 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-crimina