French Revolution had upset that old regime which Selwyn had known
so well. In his time Pelham, Newcastle, Bute, Grenville, Chatham,
Grafton, North, Rockingham, Shelburne, and Portland were successively
heads of administrations: of some of these, and of many who served
under them, Selwyn was a friend. Of the political and personal life
of every one of them he had been an interested spectator. There was
no man of the age who had a longer period of parliamentary
observation and of personal association with the leading politicians
of the time. But this intimacy with political personages never
impressed him with the importance of political office. "You will not
believe it, perhaps," he once wrote to Lady Carlisle when he had
been asked to meet Pitt at dinner, "but a minister of any
description, though served up in his great shell of power, and all
his green fat about him, is to me a dish by no means relishing, and
I never knew but one in my life I could pass an hour with pleasantly,
which was Lord Holland." Cabinet Ministers of the eighteenth century
belonged to a single section of society, which included every one of
note and every one in it knew their faults and their failings; they
were not afraid of offending constituents or of being lectured in
leading articles. Thus their littleness, rather than their
greatness, was apt to impress a daily observer like Selwyn, and to
give to his remarks an aspect of depreciation and of pessimism.

That Selwyn was a gossip, no one knew better than himself, and he
has incurred the censure of Sir George Trevelyan for repeating
tittle-tattle, as he calls it, about Fox and his gambling. But
posterity desires to see the real Fox, not an ideal statesman--to
see a man as he lived, not only a political figure. Looking back for
more than a century we may very well appreciate to the full Fox's
great qualities and yet be aware of his weaknesses and his vices, in