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historians have been put on upper shelves as out of date.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