Selwyn’s political jokes were the delight of Bellamy’s!  He said that Fox and Pitt reminded him of Hogarth’s Idle and Industrious Apprentices.  When asked by some one, as he sauntered out of the house—­’Is the House up?’ he replied; ‘No, but Burke is.’  The length of Burke’s elaborate spoken essays was proverbial, and obtained for him the name of the ‘Dinner-bell.’  Fox was talking one day at Brookes’ of the advantageous peace he had made with France, and that he had even induced that country to give up the gum trade to England.  ‘That, Charles,’ quoth Selwyn, sharply, ’I am not at all surprised at; for having drawn your teeth, they would be d——­d fools to quarrel with you about gums.’  Fox was often the object of his good-natured satire.  As every one knows, his boast was to be called ‘The Man of the People,’ though perhaps he cared as little for the great unwashed as for the wealth and happiness of the waiters at his clubs.’  Every one knows, too, what a dissolute life he led for many years.  Selwyn’s sleepiness was well known.  He slept in the House; he slept, after losing L8oo ‘and with as many more before him,’ upon the gaming-table, with the dice-box ‘stamped close to his ears;’ he slept, or half-slept, even in conversation, which he seems to have caught by fits and starts.  Thus it was that words he heard suggested different senses, partly from being only dimly associated with the subject on the tapis.  So, when, they were talking around of the war, and whether it should be a sea war or a Continent war, Selwyn woke up just enough to say, ‘I am for a sea war and a Continent admiral.’

When Fox had ruined himself, and a subscription for him was talked of, some one asked how they thought ‘he would take it.’—­’Take it,’ cried Selwyn, suddenly lighting up, ‘why, quarterly to be sure.’

His parliamentary career was then quite uneventful; but at the dissolution in 1780, he found that his security at Gloucester was threatened.  He was not Whig enough for that constituency, and had throughout supported the war with America.  He offered himself, of course, but was rejected with scorn, and forced to fly for a seat to Ludgershall.  Walpole writes to Lady Ossory:  ‘They’ (the Gloucester people) ‘hanged him in effigy, and dressed up a figure of Mie-Mie’ (his adopted daughter), ’and pinned on its breast these words, alluding to the gallows:—­“This is what I told you you would come to!"’ From Gloucester he went to Ludgershall, where he was received by ringing of bells and bonfires.  ‘Being driven out of my capital,’ said he, ’and coming into that country of turnips, where I was adored, I seemed to be arrived in my Hanoverian dominions’—­no bad hit at George II.  For Ludgershall he sat for many years, with Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, whose ‘Memoirs’ are better known than trusted, as colleague.  That writer says of Selwyn, that he was ’thoroughly well versed in our history, and master of many curious as well as secret anecdotes, relative to the houses of Stuart and Brunswick.’