So far the young gentleman went on well enough, but in 1744 he returned to England, and his rather rampant character showed itself in more than one disgraceful affair.

Among the London shows was Orator Henley, a clergyman and clergyman’s son, and a member of St. John’s, Cambridge.  He had come to London about this time, and instituted a series of lectures on universal knowledge and primitive Christianity.  He styled himself a Rationalist, a title then more honourable than it is now; and in grandiloquent language, ‘spouted’ on religious subjects to an audience admitted at a shilling a-head.  On one occasion he announced a disputation among any two of his hearers, offering to give an impartial hearing and judgment to both.  Selwyn and the young Lord Carteret were prepared, and stood up, the one to defend the ignorance, the other the impudence, of Orator Henley himself; so, at least, it is inferred from a passage in D’Israeli the Elder.  The uproar that ensued can well be imagined.  Henley himself made his escape by a back door.  His pulpit, all gilt, has been immortalized by Pope, as ‘Henley’s gilt tub;’ in which—­

  ’Imbrown’d with native bronze, lo!  Henley stands,
  Tuning his voice and balancing his hands.’

The affair gave rise to a correspondence between the Orator and his young friends; who, doubtless, came off best in the matter.

This was harmless enough, but George’s next freak was not so excusable.  The circumstances of this affair are narrated in a letter from Captain Nicholson, his friend, to George Selwyn; and may, therefore, be relied on.  It appears that being at a certain club in Oxford, at a wine party with his friends, George sent to a certain silversmith’s for a certain chalice, intrusted to the shopkeeper from a certain church to be repaired in a certain manner.  This being brought, Master George—­then, be it remembered, not at the delicate and frivolous age of most Oxford boys, but at the mature one of six-and-twenty—­filled it with wine, and handing it round, used the sacred words, ’Drink this in remembrance of me.’  This was a blasphemous parody of the most sacred rite of the Church.  All Selwyn could say for himself was, that he was drunk when he did it.  The other plea, that he did it in ridicule of the transubstantiation of the Romish Church, could not stand at all; and was most weakly put forward.  Let Oxford Dons be what they will; let them put a stop to all religious inquiry, and nearly expel Adam Smith for reading Hume’s ‘Essay on Human Nature;’ let them be, as many allege, narrow-minded, hypocritical, and ignorant; we cannot charge them with wrong-dealing in expelling the originator of such open blasphemy, which nothing can be found to palliate, and of which its perpetrator did not appear to repent, rather complaining that the treatment of the Dons was harsh.  The act of expulsion was, of course, considered in the same light by his numerous acquaintance, many of whom condoled