which he showed the strength of a passionate and virile character in
contact with certain characteristics of the society of the age.
Instead, therefore, of blaming Selwyn for repeating to
correspondents the minor incidents of the time, we ought to be
thankful to him for enabling us to picture so many of the leading
personages of that day as they were. If we look to a period before
or after that of Selwyn, we see an immortal gossip in Pepys, and in
Greville another who will be read after the works of eminent
historians have been put on upper shelves as out of date. The
detailing of the minor facts of life without malice and with
absolute truth enables posterity to form a sound judgment on a past
age.

Among the amusements of the society in which Selwyn delighted was
one which now seems both morbid and cruel: that of attending the
execution of those condemned to capital punishment. Even to his
friends and immediate successors, no less than to those who have
written of him, the fact that a man so full of kindness, who took
pleasure in the innocent companionship of children, could with
positive eagerness witness the hanging of a thief at Tyburn, has
been a cause of surprise. When one is conversant with the history of
the time the astonishment is ridiculous. The sight of a man on the
gallows no more disturbed the serenity of the most good-natured of
men at the end of the eighteenth century than do the dying flutters
of a partridge the susceptibilities of the most cultured of modern
sportsmen. Selwyn was ever trying to get as much amusement out of
life as possible, and he would have been acting contrary to all the
ideas of the fashionable society of his age if he had sat at home
when a criminal was to die. It was said of Boswell, just as it was
of Selwyn, that he was passionately fond of attending executions. We