intimate friendship: now pleasing by his wit, and now helping by his
kindness and common sense.

Castle Howard was the place, outside London, which most attracted
him. It is even to-day a long way from the metropolis, and one feels
something like surprise that such a lover of the town as Selwyn
could, even to the end of his life, undertake the tiresome journey
to Yorkshire. But in the stately galleries of Vanbrugh's design he
renewed his associations with France. There he was not bored by
country society; in the home circle he had all the company he
needed. He could look out over the rolling uplands and see the
distant wolds, contented to observe and enjoy them from afar amidst
the books and pictures which his host had collected. If he wanted
exercise the spacious gardens were at hand, and the artificial
adornment of temples and statuary pleased a taste highly cultivated
after the fashion of the times.

In a drawing-room Selwyn was as welcome as in a club, and he could
only be said to be out of place in his own country house, more
especially at the time of an election for Gloucester. The modern
love of landscape, of country life as an aesthetic pleasure, was
unknown to him. Civilisation, refinement, seemed to him to be
confined to London and Paris, to Bath or Tunbridge Wells. "Now sto
per partire, and I ought in point of discretion to set out
to-morrow, but I dare say 'twill be Friday evening before I'll have
the courage to throw myself off the cart. But then go I must; for on
Monday our Assizes begin, and how long I shall stay the Lord knows,
but I hope in God not more than ten days at farthest, for I find my
aversion to that part of the world greater and more insufferable
every day of my life, and indeed have no wish to be absent from home