I have heard, at times, of maiden ladies of a certain age who found pleasure in the affection of ’spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedge-hogs, newts, and in live worms.’  I frequently meet ladies who think conversation lacks interest without the recital of ’melancholy deaths,’ ‘fatal diseases,’ and ‘mournful cases;’ on ne dispute pas les gouts, and certainly the taste for the night side of nature seems immensely prevalent among the lower orders—­in whom, perhaps, the terrible only can rouse from a sullen insensibility.  What happy people!  I always think to myself, when I hear of the huge attendance on the last tragic performance at Newgate; how very little they can see of mournful and horrible in common life, if they seek it out so eagerly, and relish it so thoroughly, when they find it!  I don’t know; for my own part, gaudeamus.  I have always thought that the text, ’Blessed are they that mourn,’ referred to the inner private life, not to a perpetual display of sackcloth and ashes; but I know not.  I can understand the weeping-willow taste among people, who have too little wit or too little Christianity to be cheerful, but it is a wonder to find the luxury of gloom united to the keenest perception of the laughable in such a man as George Selwyn.

If human beings could be made pets, like Miss Tabitha’s snake or toad, Selwyn would have fondled a hangman.  He loved the noble art of execution, and was a connoisseur of the execution of the art.  In childhood he must have decapitated his rocking-horse, hanged his doll in a miniature gallows, and burnt his baubles at mimic stakes.  The man whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced—­and only that ever did announce it—­the flashing wit within the mind, by a gay crowd of loungers at Arthur’s, might be found next day rummaging among coffins in a damp vault, glorying in a mummy, confessing and preparing a live criminal, paying any sum for a relic of a dead one, or pressing eagerly forward to witness the dying agonies of a condemned man.

Yet Walpole and Warner both bore the highest testimony to the goodness of his heart; and it is impossible to doubt that his nature was as gentle as a woman’s.  There have been other instances of even educated men delighting in scenes of suffering; but in general their characters have been more or less gross, their heads more or less insensible.  The husband of Madame Recamier went daily to see the guillotine do its vile work during the reign of Terror; but then he was a man who never wept over the death of a friend.  The man who was devoted to a little child, whom he adopted and treated with the tenderest care, was very different from M. Recamier—­and that he had a heart there is no doubt.  He was an anomaly, and famous for being so; though, perhaps, his well-known eccentricity was taken advantage of by his witty friends, and many a story fathered on Selwyn which has no origin but in the brain of its narrator.