low window at which
old Q. sat to his very last days, ogling through his senile glasses the
women as they passed by.

There must have been a great deal of good about this lazy, sleepy George
Selwyn, which, no doubt, is set to his present credit. "Your friendship,"
writes Carlisle to him, "is so different from anything I have ever met
with or seen in the world, that when I recollect the extraordinary proofs
of your kindness, it seems to me like a dream." "I have lost my oldest
friend, and acquaintance, G. Selwyn," writes Walpole to Miss Berry: "I
really loved him, not only for his infinite wit, but for a thousand good
qualities." I am glad, for my part, that such a lover of cakes and ale
should have had a thousand good qualities--that he should have been
friendly, generous, warm-hearted, trustworthy. "I rise at six," writes
Carlisle to him, from Spa (a great resort of fashionable people in our
ancestors' days), "play at cricket till dinner, and dance in the evening,
till I can scarcely crawl to bed at eleven. There is a life for you! You
get up at nine; play with Raton your dog till twelve, in your
dressing-gown; then creep down to White's; are five hours at table; sleep
till supper-time; and then make two wretches carry you in a sedan-chair,
with three pints of claret in you, three miles for a shilling."
Occasionally, instead of sleeping at White's, George went down and snoozed
in the House of Commons by the side of Lord North. He represented
Gloucester for many years, and had a borough of his own, Ludgershall, for
which, when he was too lazy to contest Gloucester, he sat himself. "I have
given directions for the election of Ludgershall to be of Lord Melbourne
and myself," he writes to the Premier, whose friend he was, and who was
himself as sleepy, as witty, and as good-natured as George.

If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and
fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal,
we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that
we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for
work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a
large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a
great fortune, do but be splendid and idle? In these letters of Lord
Carlisle's from which I have been quoting, there is many a just complaint
made by the kind-hearted young nobleman of the state which he is