ON TWO KINDS OF WIT. 91 that might have been given, if more of his mots had been preserved; and their effect on his listeners depended more on the manner of delivery than on the matter. That they were improvised and unpremeditated is another important consideration. It is quite unfair to compare them, as Warburton does, with the hebdomadal trash of 'Punch,' though perhaps they would stand the comparison pretty well. It is one thing to force wit with plenty of time to invent and meditate it—another to have so much wit within you that you can bring it out on any occasion; one thing to compose a good fancy for money-another to utter it only when it flashes through the brain. But it matters little what we in the present day may think of Selwyn's wit, for conversation is spoiled by bottling, and should be drawn fresh when wanted. Selwyn's companionsall men of wit, more or less, affirmed him to be the most amusing man of his day, and that was all the part he had to play. No real wit ever hopes to talk for posterity; and written wit is of a very different character to the more sparkling, if less solid, creations of a moment. We have seen Selwyn in many points of view, not all very creditable to him: first, expelled from Oxford for blasphemy ; next, a professed gambler and the associate of men who led fashion in those days, it is true, but then it was very bad fashion; then as a lover of hangmen, a wit and a lounger. There is reason to believe that Selwyn, though less openly reprobate than many of his associates, was, in his quiet way, just as bad as any of them, if we except the Duke of Queensberry, his intimate friend, or the disgusting Franciscans' of Medmenham Abbey, of whom, though not the founder, nor even a member, he was, in a manner, the suggester in his blasphemy. But Selwyn's real character is only seen in profile in all these accounts. He had at the bottom of such vice, to which his position, and the fashion of the day introduced him, a far 92 SELWYN'S LOVE FOR CHILDREN. better heart than any of his contemporaries, and in some respects a kind of simplicity which was endearing. He was neither knave nor fool. He was not a voluptuary, like his friend the duke; nor a continued drunkard, like many other 'fine gentlemen' with whom he mixed; nor a cheat, though a gambler; nor a sceptic, like his friend Walpole; nor a blasphemer, like the Medmenham set, though he had once parodied profanely a sacred rite; nor was he steeped in debt, as Fox was; nor does he appear to have been a practised seducer, as too many of his acquaintance were. Not that these negative qualities are to his praise; but if we look at the age and the society around him, we must, at least, admit that Selwyn was not one of the worst of that wicked set. But the most pleasing point in the character of the old bachelor-for he was too much of a wit ever to marry-is his affection for children-not his own. That is, not avowedly his own, for it was often suspected that the little ones he took up so fondly bore some relationship to him, and there can be little doubt that Selwyn, like everybody else in that evil age, had his intrigues. He did not die in his sins, and that is almost all we can say for him. He gave up gaming in time, protesting that it was the bane of four much better things-health, money, time, and thinking. For the last two, perhaps, he cared little. Before his death he is said to have been a Christian, which was a decided rarity in the fashionable set of his day. Walpole answered, when asked if he was a Freemason, that he never had been anything, and probably most of the men of the time would, if they had had the honesty, have said the same. They were not atheists professedly, but they neither believed in nor practised Christianity. His love for children has been called one of his eccentricities. It would be a hard name to give it if he had not been a club-lounger of his day. I have sufficient faith in human nature to trust that two-thirds of the men of this MIE-MIE, THE LITTLE ITALIAN. 93 country have that most amiable eccentricity. But in Selwyn it amounted to something more than in the ordinary paterfamilias: it was almost a passion. He was almost motherly in his celibate tenderness to the little ones to whom he took a fancy. This affection he showed to several of the children, sons or daughters, of his friends; but to two especially, Anne Coventry and Maria Fagniani. The former was the daughter of the beautiful Maria Gunning, who became Countess of Coventry. Nanny, as he called her, was four years old when her mother died, and from that time he treated her almost as his own child. But Mie-Mie, as the little Italian was called, was far more favoured. No picture can better display the vice of the age than that of two men of the highest fashion, one of them the Duke of Queensberry, the greatest libertine and most disgusting profligate that ever disgraced the British peerage (which is saying much), vying for the honour of being the father of this poor little girl, while a reverend doctor attempted to decide the question, and advised one of them actually to marry her; and her own shameless mother encouraged each in his fancy, and alternately assured the one or the other that he was really its progenitor. The doubt of the paternity may afford a pleasant subject of investigation to certain precisionists of our day, but we beg to decline entering on such an inquiry. Whoever may have been the child's father, her mother was a rather beautiful and very immoral woman, the wife of the Marchese Fagniani. She seems to have desired to make the most for her daughter out of the extraordinary rivalry of the two English 'gentlemen,' and they were admirably taken in by her. Whatever the truth may have been, Selwyn's love for children showed itself more strongly in this case than in any other; and, oddly enough, it seems to have begun when the little girl was at an age when children scarcely interest other men than their fathers-in short, in |