His friend Walpole gives us an immense number of both, not all of a first-rate nature, nor many interesting in the present day. Selwyn, calm as he was, brought out his sayings on the spur of the moment, and their appropriateness to the occasion was one of their greatest recommendations. A good saying, like a good sermon, depends much on its delivery, and loses much in print. Nothing less immortal than wit! To take first, however, the eccentricities of his character, and especially his love of horrors, we find anecdotes by the dozen retailed of him. It was so well known, that Lord Holland, when dying, ordered his servant to be sure to admit Mr. Selwyn if he called to enquire after him, ’for if I am alive,’ said he, ’I shall be glad to see him, and if I am dead, he will be glad to see me.’ The name of Holland leads us to an anecdote told by Walpole. Selwyn was looking over Cornbury with Lord Abergavenny and Mrs. Frere, ‘who loved one another a little,’ and was disgusted with the frivolity of the woman who could take no interest in anything worth seeing. ‘You don’t know what you missed in the other room,’ he cried at last, peevishly. ’Why, what?’—’Why, my Lord Holland’s picture.’—’Well, what is my Lord Holland to me?’ ‘Don’t you know,’ whispered the wit mysteriously, ’that Lord Holland’s body lies in the same vault in Kensington Church with my Lord Abergavenny’s mother?’ ’Lord! she was so obliged,’ says Walpole, ‘and thanked him a thousand times!’
Selwyn knew the vaults as thoroughly as old Anthony Wood knew the brasses. The elder Craggs had risen by the favour of Marlborough, whose footman he had been, and his son was eventually a Secretary of State. Arthur Moore, the father of James Moore Smyth, of whom Pope wrote—
’Arthur, whose giddy son neglects
the laws,
Imputes to me and my damned works the
cause’
had worn a livery too. When Craggs got into a coach with him, he exclaimed, ‘Why, Arthur, I am always getting up behind, are not you?’ Walpole having related this story to Selwyn, the latter told him, as a most important communication, that Arthur Moore had had his coffin chained to that of his mistress. ‘Lord! how do you know?’ asked Horace. ‘Why, I saw them the other day in a vault at St. Giles’s.’ ’Oh! Your servant, Mr. Selwyn,’ cried the man who showed the tombs at Westminster Abbey, ’I expected to see you here the other day when the old Duke of Richmond’s body was taken up.’
Criminals were, of course, included in his passion. Walpole affirms that he had a great share in bringing Lord Dacre’s footman, who had murdered the butler, to confess his crime. In writing the confession, the ingenious plush coolly stopped and asked how ‘murdered’ was spelt. But it mattered little to George whether the criminal were alive or dead, and he defended his eccentric taste with his usual wit; when rallied by some women for going to see the Jacobite Lord Lovat’s head cut off, he retorted, sharply—’I