* * * * *




HIGH LIFE IN THE LAST CENTURY.[5]

[5] _George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, with Memoirs and Notes_.
By T.H. Jesse. 4 vols.


The volumes of which we are about to give fragments and anecdotes, contain
a portion of the letters addressed to a man of witty memory, whose
existence was passed almost exclusively among men and women of rank; his
life, in the most expressive sense of the word, West End; and even in that
West End, his chief haunt St James's Street. Parliament and the Clubs
divided his day, and often his night. The brilliant roués, the steady
gamesters, the borough venders, and the lordly ex-members of ex-cabinets,
were the only population of whose living and breathing he suffered himself
to have any cognizance. In reverse of Gray's learned mouse, eating its way
through the folios of an ancient library--and to whom

"A river or a sea was but a dish of tea,
And a kingdom bread and butter,"

to George Selwyn, the world and all that it inhabits, were concentrated in
Charles Fox, William Pitt, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the circle of
men of pleasantry, loose lives, and vivacious temperaments, who, with
whatever diminishing lustre, revolved round them.