vated
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 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 coalit