At last he declared that he should ‘be content with a sprig of rosemary’ thrown on him when the parson of the parish commits his ‘dust to dust.’  The end of his now suffering existence was near at hand.  Irritability, one of the unpitied accompaniments of weakness, seemed to compete with the gathering clouds of mental darkness as the last hour drew on.  At intervals there were flashes of a wit that appeared at that solemn moment hardly natural, and that must have startled rather than pleased, the watchful friends around him.  He became unjust in his fretfulness, and those who loved him most could not wish to see him survive the wreck of his intellect.  Fever came on, and he died on the 2nd of March, 1797.

He had collected his letters from his friends:  these epistles were deposited in two boxes, one marked with an A., the other with a B. The chest A. was not to be opened until the eldest son of his grandniece, Lady Laura, should attain the age of twenty-five.  The chest was found to contain memoirs, and bundles of letters ready for publication.

It was singular, at the sale of the effects at Strawberry Hill, to see this chest, with the MSS. in the clean Horatian hand, and to reflect how poignant would have been the anguish of the writer could he have seen his Gothic Castle given up for fourteen days, to all that could pain the living, or degrade the dead.

Peace to his manes, prince of letter-writers; prince companion of beaux; wit of the highest order!  Without thy pen, society in the eighteenth century would have been to us almost as dead as the beau monde of Pompeii, or the remains of Etruscan leaders of the ton.  Let us not be ungrateful to our Horace:  we owe him more than we could ever have calculated on before we knew him through his works:  prejudiced, he was not false; cold, he was rarely cruel; egotistical, he was seldom vain-glorious.  Every age should have a Horace Walpole; every country possess a chronicler so sure, so keen to perceive, so exact to delineate peculiarities, manners, characters, and events.

GEORGE SELWYN.

A Love of Horrors.—­Anecdotes of Selwyn’s Mother.—­Selwyn’s College Days.—­Orator Henley.—­Selwyn’s Blasphemous Freak.—­The Profession of a Wit.—­The Thirst for Hazard.—­Reynolds’s Conversation-Piece.—­ Selwyn’s Eccentricities and Witticisms.—­A most Important Communication.—­An Amateur Headsman.—­The Eloquence of Indifference.—­ Catching a Housebreaker.—­The Family of the Selwyns.—­The Man of the People.—­Selwyn’s Parliamentary Career.—­True Wit.—–­Some of Selwyn’s Witty Sayings.—­The Sovereignty of the People.—­On two kinds of Wit.—­ Selwyn’s Love for Children.—­Mie Mie, the Little Italian.—­Selwyn’s Little Companion taken from him.—­His Later Days and Death.