made full amends, for I went to see it sewn on again.’  He had indeed done so, and given the company at the undertaker’s a touch of his favourite blasphemy, for when the man of coffins had done his work and laid the body in its box, Selwyn, imitating the voice of the Lord Chancellor at the trial, muttered, ’My Lord Lovat, you may rise.’  He said a better thing on the trial of a confederate of Lovat’s, that Lord Kilmarnock, with whom the ladies fell so desperately in love as he stood on his defence.  Mrs. Bethel, who was famous for a hatchet-face, was among the fair spectators:  ‘What a shame it is,’ quoth the wit, ’to turn her face to the prisoners before they are condemned!’ Terrible, indeed, was that instrument of death to those men, who had in the heat of battle so gallantly met sword and blunderbuss.  The slow, sure approach of the day of the scaffold was a thousand times worse than the roar of cannon.  Lord Cromarty was pardoned, solely, it was said, from pity for his poor wife, who was at the time of the trial far advanced in pregnancy.  It was affirmed that the child born had a distinct mark of an axe on his neck. Credat Judaeus!  Walpole used to say that Selwyn never thought but a la tete tranchee, and that when he went to have a tooth drawn, he told the dentist he would drop his handkerchief by way of signal.  Certain it is that he did love an execution, whatever he or his friends may have done to remove the impression of this extraordinary taste.  Some better men than Selwyn have had the same, and Macaulay accuses Penn of a similar affection.  The best known anecdote of Selwyn’s peculiarity relates to the execution of Damiens, who was torn with red-hot pincers, and finally quartered by four horses, for the attempt to assassinate Louis XV.  On the day fixed, George mingled with the crowd plainly dressed, and managed to press forward close to the place of torture.  The executioner observing him, eagerly cried out, ’Faites place pour Monsieur; c’est un Anglais et un amateur;’ or, as another version goes, he was asked if he was not himself a bourreau.—­’Non, Monsieur,’ he is said to have answered, ‘je n’ai pas cet honneur, je ne suis qu’un amateur.’ The story is more than apocryphal, for Selwyn is not the only person of whom it has been told; and he was even accused, according to Wraxall, of going to executions in female costume.  George Selwyn must have passed as a ‘remarkably fine woman,’ in that case.

It is only justice to him to say that the many stories of his attending executions were supposed to be inventions of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, another wit, and of Chesterfield, another, and a rival.  In confirmation, it is adduced that when the former had been relating some new account, and an old friend of Selwyn’s expressed his surprise that he had never heard the tale before, the hero of it replied quietly, ’No wonder at all, for Sir Charles has just invented it, and knows that I will not by contradiction spoil the pleasure of the company he is so highly entertaining.’