later any number of witticisms were attributed to Sydney Smith which he had never uttered.  It was truly remarked of Selwyn at the time of his death:  “Many good things he did say, there was no doubt, and many he was capable of saying, but the number of good, bad, and indifferent things attributed to him as bon mots for the last thirty years of his life were sufficient to stock a foundling hospital for wit."*

* Grenville Correspondence, vol. 11. p. 372.

* Gentleman’s Magazine, 1791, p. 94.

It is therefore not surprising that Selwyn has been handed down to posterity as a wit.  It is a dismal reputation.  Jokes collected in contemporary memoirs fall flat after a century’s keeping; the essential of their success is spontaneity, appropriateness, the appreciation even of their teller, often also a knowledge among those who hear them of the peculiarities of the persons whom they mock.  When we read one of them now, we are almost inclined to wonder how such a reputation for humour could be gained.  Wit is of the present; preserved for posterity it is as uninteresting as a faded flower, nor can it recall to us memories sunny or sad.  But Selwyn was a man who while filling a conspicuous place in the fashionable life of the age was also so intimate with statesmen and politicians, and so thoroughly lives in his correspondence, that in following his life we find ourselves one of that singular society which in the last half of the eighteenth century ruled the British Empire from St. James’s Street.

Selwyn’s life, though passed in a momentous age, was uneventful, but the course of it must be traced.

George Augustus Selwyn, second son of Colonel John Selwyn, of Matson, in Gloucestershire, and of Mary, daughter of General Farrington, of Kent, was born on the 11th of August, 1719.  His father, aide-de-camp to Marlborough and a friend of Sir Robert Walpole, was a man of character and ability, well known in the courts of the first and second Georges.  Selwyn, however, probably inherited his wit and his enjoyment of society from his mother, who was Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte.  Horace Walpole writes of her as “Mrs. Selwyn, mother of the famous George, and herself of much vivacity, and pretty.”

Selwyn’s elder brother died in 1751, and grief at his loss seems to have hastened the death of his father, which occurred in the same year.

His sister Albinia married Thomas Townshend, second son of Charles Viscount Townshend.  By this marriage the families of Selwyn and Walpole were connected.

The home of the family was at Matson, a village two and a half miles south-east of Gloucester, on the spurs of the Cotswold hills, looking over the Severn valley—­once called Mattesdone.  There is a good deal of obscurity as to the ownership of the manor in mediaeval times, but it appears to have been in the possession of what may popularly speaking be called the family of Mattesdone.  The landowner described himself by the place; “Ego Philippus de Mattesdone” are the words of an ancient document preserved among the records of the Monastery of St. Peter at Gloucester.*