But the most pleasing point in the character of the old bachelor—­for he was too much of a wit ever to marry—­is his affection for children—­not his own.  That is, not avowedly his own, for it was often suspected that the little ones he took up so fondly bore some relationship to him, and there can be little doubt that Selwyn, like everybody else in that evil age, had his intrigues.  He did not die in his sins, and that is almost all we can say for him.  He gave up gaming in time, protesting that it was the bane of four much better things—­health, money, time, and thinking.  For the last two, perhaps, he cared little.  Before his death he is said to have been a Christian, which was a decided rarity in the fashionable set of his day.  Walpole answered, when asked if he was a Freemason, that he never had been anything, and probably most of the men of the time would, if they had had the honesty, have said the same.  They were not atheists professedly, but they neither believed in nor practised Christianity.

His love for children has been called one of his eccentricities.  It would be a hard name to give it if he had not been a club-lounger of his day.  I have sufficient faith in human nature to trust that two-thirds of the men of this country have that most amiable eccentricity.  But in Selwyn it amounted to something more than in the ordinary paterfamilias:  it was almost a passion.  He was almost motherly in his celibate tenderness to the little ones to whom he took a fancy.  This affection he showed to several of the children, sons or daughters, of his friends; but to two especially, Anne Coventry and Maria Fagniani.

The former was the daughter of the beautiful Maria Gunning, who became Countess of Coventry.  Nanny, as he called her, was four years old when her mother died, and from that time he treated her almost as his own child.

But Mie-Mie, as the little Italian was called, was far more favoured.  Whoever may have been the child’s father, her mother was a rather beautiful and very immoral woman, the wife of the Marchese Fagniani.  She seems to have desired to make the most for her daughter out of the extraordinary rivalry of the two English ‘gentlemen,’ and they were admirably taken in by her.  Whatever the truth may have been, Selwyn’s love for children showed itself more strongly in this case than in any other; and, oddly enough, it seems to have begun when the little girl was at an age when children scarcely interest other men than their fathers—­in short, in infancy.  Her parents allowed him to have the sole charge of her at a very early age, when they returned to the Continent; but in 1777, the marchioness, being then in Brussels, claimed her daughter back again; though less, it seems, from any great anxiety on the child’s account, than because her husband’s parents, in Milan, objected to their grand-daughter being left in England; and also, not a little, from fear of the voice of Mrs. Grundy.  Selwyn seems to have used