the men of this 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.
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 infancy. Her parents allowed him to have the sole
charge of her at a very early age, when they returned to the Continent;
but in 1777, the marchioness, being then in Brussels, claimed her
daughter back again; though less, it seems, from any great anxiety on
the child's account, than because her husband's parents, in Milan,
objected to their grand-daughter being left in England; and also, not a
little, from fear of the voice of Mrs. Grundy. Selwyn seems to have used
all kinds of arguments to retain the child; and a long correspondence
took place, which the marchesa begins with, 'My very dear friend,' and