home but to go to Castle Howard, which I hope that I shall not delay many days after my return from Gloucestershire” (August, 1774).  A week later he had arrived at his home.  “The weather is very fine, and Matson in as great beauty as a place can be in, but the beauties of it make very little impression upon me; in short, there is nothing in the eccentric situation in which I am now that can afford me the least pleasure, and everything I love to see in the world is at a distance from me” (August 9, 1774).

To-day such a man as Selwyn Would have had a choice collection of water colours; he would be ashamed if he could not appreciate the tone and tenderness of an English landscape.  But though a friend of Reynolds and of Romney, though he commissioned and appreciated Gainsborough, and valued the masterpieces of the past, in a word, was essentially a man of culture, yet this phase of modern refinement was utterly unknown to him.

As a politician Selwyn, as has already been said, was a sinecurist; he never took a political interest in affairs of state, and he looked at events which have become historical from an unpolitical point of view.  But though he writes of parliamentary incidents as a spectator, there is always in his letters a personal characterisation which gives them vividness and life.  For his long parliamentary career brought Selwyn continually into contact with many varied personalities of several political generations.  When he entered the House of Commons Henry Pelham was Prime Minister, and the elder Pitt had not yet formed that coalition with the Duke of Newcastle which enabled him to command a majority in the House of Commons and to be the greatest War Minister of the century.  When Selwyn died, still a Member of Parliament, the younger Pitt was Prime Minister and the French Revolution had upset that old regime which Selwyn had known so well.  In his time Pelham, Newcastle, Bute, Grenville, Chatham, Grafton, North, Rockingham, Shelburne, and Portland were successively heads of administrations:  of some of these, and of many who served under them, Selwyn was a friend.  Of the political and personal life of every one of them he had been an interested spectator.  There was no man of the age who had a longer period of parliamentary observation and of personal association with the leading politicians of the time.  But this intimacy with political personages never impressed him with the importance of political office.  “You will not believe it, perhaps,” he once wrote to Lady Carlisle when he had been asked to meet Pitt at dinner, “but a minister of any description, though served up in his great shell of power, and all his green fat about him, is to me a dish by no means relishing, and I never knew but one in my life I could pass an hour with pleasantly, which was Lord Holland.”  Cabinet Ministers of the eighteenth century belonged to a single section of society, which included every one of note and every one in it knew their faults and their failings; they were not afraid of offending constituents or of being lectured in leading articles.  Thus their littleness, rather than their greatness, was apt to impress a daily observer like Selwyn, and to give to his remarks an aspect of depreciation and of pessimism.