The other group was of a younger generation, more brilliant and more modern.  They might not inappropriately be called the Fox group, since his personality was so conspicuous among them.  They talked politics and gambled at Brooks’s, they appreciated each other’s brightness, and lost their money with the indifference of true friends.  There was the gallant and charming soldier Fitzpatrick, the schoolfellow and friend of Fox, the sagacious and versatile but place-seeking Storer.  Hare, who, less well-born, had risen by his wit and talents to a place among the cleverest men of the time, “the Hare with many friends,” as he was called by the Duchess of Gordon.  Frederick, Earl of Carlisle and Crawford, the “petit Craufurt” of Mme. du Deffand; and chief of all was Charles Fox, who to Selwyn was incomprehensible.  Selwyn had been his father’s friend, and had known him from childhood.  He loved him and liked his companionship; yet his unrestrained folly at the gambling-table and on the racecourse, his loose ideas on money matters, and his political opinions, at times annoyed, irritated, and puzzled him almost beyond endurance.  With the older and the younger group Selwyn was on the same terms of intimate friendship:  now pleasing by his wit, and now helping by his kindness and common sense.

Castle Howard was the place, outside London, which most attracted him.  It is even to-day a long way from the metropolis, and one feels something like surprise that such a lover of the town as Selwyn could, even to the end of his life, undertake the tiresome journey to Yorkshire.  But in the stately galleries of Vanbrugh’s design he renewed his associations with France.  There he was not bored by country society; in the home circle he had all the company he needed.  He could look out over the rolling uplands and see the distant wolds, contented to observe and enjoy them from afar amidst the books and pictures which his host had collected.  If he wanted exercise the spacious gardens were at hand, and the artificial adornment of temples and statuary pleased a taste highly cultivated after the fashion of the times.

In a drawing-room Selwyn was as welcome as in a club, and he could only be said to be out of place in his own country house, more especially at the time of an election for Gloucester.  The modern love of landscape, of country life as an aesthetic pleasure, was unknown to him.  Civilisation, refinement, seemed to him to be confined to London and Paris, to Bath or Tunbridge Wells.  “Now sto per partire, and I ought in point of discretion to set out to-morrow, but I dare say ’twill be Friday evening before I’ll have the courage to throw myself off the cart.  But then go I must; for on Monday our Assizes begin, and how long I shall stay the Lord knows, but I hope in God not more than ten days at farthest, for I find my aversion to that part of the world greater and more insufferable every day of my life, and indeed have no wish to be absent from