whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced--and
only that ever did announce it--the flashing wit within the mind, by a
gay crowd of loungers at Arthur's, might be found next day rummaging
among coffins in a damp vault, glorying in a mummy, confessing and
preparing a live criminal, paying any sum for a relic of a dead one, or
pressing eagerly forward to witness the dying agonies of a condemned
man.

Yet Walpole and Warner both bore the highest testimony to the goodness
of his heart; and it is impossible to doubt that his nature was as
gentle as a woman's. There have been other instances of even educated
men delighting in scenes of suffering; but in general their characters
have been more or less gross, their heads more or less insensible. The
husband of Madame Récamier went daily to see the guillotine do its vile
work during the reign of Terror; but then he was a man who never wept
over the death of a friend. The man who was devoted to a little child,
whom he adopted and treated with the tenderest care, was very different
from M. Récamier--and that he _had_ a heart there is no doubt. He was an
anomaly, and famous for being so; though, perhaps, his well-known
eccentricity was taken advantage of by his witty friends, and many a
story fathered on Selwyn which has no origin but in the brain of its
narrator.

George Augustus Selwyn, then, famous for his wit, and notorious for his
love of horrors, was the second son of a country gentleman, of Matson,
in Gloucestershire, Colonel John Selwyn, who had been an aide-de-camp of
Marlborough's, and afterwards a frequenter of the courts of the first
two Georges. He inherited his wit chiefly from his mother, Mary, the
daughter of General Farington or Farringdon, of the county of Kent.
Walpole tells us that she figured among the beauties of the court of the