Imputes to me and my damned works the cause'
had worn a livery too. When Craggs got into a coach with him, he exclaimed, 'Why, Arthur, I am always getting up behind, are not you?' Walpole having related this story to Selwyn, the latter told him, as a most important communication, that Arthur Moore had had his coffin chained to that of his mistress. 'Lord! how do you know?' asked Horace. 'Why, I saw them the other day in a vault at St. Giles's.' 'Oh! Your servant, Mr. Selwyn,' cried the man who showed the tombs at Westminster Abbey, 'I expected to see you here the other day when the old Duke of Richmond's body was taken up.'
Criminals were, of course, included in his passion. Walpole affirms that he had a great share in bringing Lord Dacre's footman, who had murdered the butler, to confess his crime. In writing the confession, the ingenious plush coolly stopped and asked how 'murdered' was spelt. But it mattered little to George whether the criminal were alive or dead, and he defended his eccentric taste with his usual wit; when rallied by some women for going to see the Jacobite Lord Lovat's head cut off, he retorted, sharply—'I made full amends, for I went to see it sewn on again.' He had indeed done so, and given the company at the undertaker's a touch of his favourite blasphemy, for when the man of coffins had done his work and laid the body in its box, Selwyn, imitating the voice of the Lord Chancellor at the trial, muttered, 'My Lord Lovat, you may rise.' He said a better thing on the trial of a confederate of Lovat's, that Lord Kilmarnock, with whom the ladies fell so desperately in love as he stood on his defence. Mrs. Bethel, who was famous for a hatchet-face, was among the fair spectators: 'What a shame it is,' quoth the wit, 'to turn her face to the prisoners before they are condemned!' Terrible, indeed, was that instrument of death to those men, who had in the heat of battle so gallantly met sword and blunderbuss. The slow, sure approach of the day of the scaffold was a thousand times worse than the roar of cannon. Lord Cromarty was pardoned, solely, it was said, from pity for his poor wife, who was at the time of the trial far advanced in pregnancy. It was affirmed that the child born had a distinct mark of an axe on his neck. Credat Judaeus! Walpole used to say that Selwyn never thought but à la tête tranchée, and that when he went to have a tooth drawn, he told the dentist he would drop his handkerchief by way of signal. Certain it is that he did love an execution, whatever he or his friends may have done to remove the impression of this extraordinary taste. Some better men than Selwyn have had the same, and Macaulay accuses Penn of a similar affection. The best known anecdote of Selwyn's peculiarity relates to the execution of Damiens, who was torn with red-hot pincers, and finally quartered by four horses, for the attempt to assassinate Louis XV. On the day fixed, George mingled with the crowd plainly dressed, and managed to press forward close to the place of torture. The executioner observing him, eagerly cried out, 'Faites place pour Monsieur; c'est un Anglais et un amateur;' or, as another version goes, he was asked if he was not himself a bourreau.—'Non, Monsieur,' he is said to have answered, 'je n'ai pas cet honneur, je ne suis qu'un amateur.' The story is more than apocryphal, for Selwyn is not the only person of whom it has been told; and he was even accused, according to Wraxall, of going to executions in female costume. George Selwyn must have passed as a 'remarkably fine woman,' in that case.
It is only justice to him to say that the many stories of his attending executions were supposed to be inventions of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, another wit, and of Chesterfield, another, and a rival. In confirmation, it is adduced that when the former had been relating some new account, and an old friend of Selwyn's expressed his surprise that he had never heard the tale before, the hero of it replied quietly, 'No wonder at all, for Sir Charles has just invented it, and knows that I will not by contradiction spoil the pleasure of the company he is so highly entertaining.'
Wit has been called 'the eloquence of indifference;' no one seems ever to have been so indifferent about everything, but his little daughter, as George Selwyn. He always, however, took up the joke, and when asked why he had not been to see one Charles Fox, a low criminal, hanged at Tyburn, answered, quietly, 'I make a point of never going to rehearsals.'
Selwyn's love for this kind of thing, to believe his most intimate friend, Horace Walpole, was quite a fact. His friend relates that he even bargained for the High Sheriff's wand, after it was broken, at the condemnation of the gallant Lords, but said, 'that he behaved so like an attorney the first day, and so like a pettifogger the second, that he would not take it to light his fire with.'
The State Trials, of course, interested George more than any other in his eventless life; he dined after the sentence with the celebrated Lady Townshend, who was so devoted to Lord Kilmarnock—
'Pitied by gentle minds, Kilmarnock died'—Johnson.
that she is said to have even stayed under his windows, when he was in prison; but he treated her anxiety with such lightness that the lady burst into tears, and 'flung up-stairs.' 'George,' writes Walpole to Montague, 'cooly took Mrs. Dorcas, her woman, and bade her sit down to finish the bottle.—"And pray," said Dorcas, "do you think my lady will be prevailed upon to let me go and see the execution? I have a friend that has promised to take care of me, and I can lie in the Tower the night before." Could she have talked so pleasantly to Selwyn?'
His contemporaries certainly believed in his love for Newgatism; for when Walpole had caught a housebreaker in a neighbour's area, he immediately despatched a messenger to White's for the philo-criminalist, who was sure to be playing at the Club any time before daylight. It happened that the drawer at the 'Chocolate-house' had been himself lately robbed, and therefore stole to George with fear and trembling, and muttered mysteriously to him, 'Mr. Walpole's compliments, and he has got a housebreaker for you.' Of course Selwyn obeyed the summons readily, and the event concluded, as such events do nine times out of ten, with a quiet capture, and much ado about nothing.