Burke's speeches, which were destined to become the honour of his age, and the delight of posterity, were sometimes negligently received by the house. His splendid prolixity, which was fitter for an assembly of philosophers than an English Parliament, sometimes wearied mere men of business, as much as his fine metaphysics sometimes perplexed them; and the man who might have sat between Plato and Aristotle, and been listened to with congenial delight by both, was often left without an audience. One night, when Selwyn was hurrying into the lobby with a crowd of members, a nobleman coming up asked him, "Is the house up?" "No," was the reply, "but Burke is." A model of fashionable life, Selwyn unhappily indulged in that vice which was presumed to be essential to the man of fashion. The early gaming propensities of Charles Fox are well known; he was ruined, estate, personal fortune, sinecures and reversions, and all, before he was five years in public life--ruined in every possible shape of ruin. There were times when he could not command a guinea in the world. Yet there were times when he won immensely. At one sitting he carried off L8000, but in a few more he lost L11,000. He was a capital whist player; and in the cool calculation of the clubs on such subjects, it was supposed that he might have made L4000 a-year, if he had adhered to this profitable direction of his genius. But, like many other great men, he mistook his forte, and disdained all but the desperation of hazard. There he lost perpetually and prodigiously, until he was stripped of every thing, and pauperised for life. It gives a strong conception of the universality of this vice, to find so timid and girlish a nature as the late William Wilberforce's initiated into the same career. "When I left the University," says Wilberforce, in his later reminiscences, "so little did I know of general society, that I came up to London stored with arguments to prove the authenticity of 'Rowley's Poems,' (the academic and pedantic topic of the day,) and now I was at once immersed in politics and fashion. The very first time I went to Boodle's, I won twenty-five guineas of the Duke of Norfolk. I belonged at this time to five clubs, Miles' and Evans', Brookes', Boodle's, White's, and Goosetree's. The first time I was at Brookes', scarcely knowing any one, I joined, from mere shyness, in play at the faro-table, where George Selwyn kept bank. A friend who knew my inexperience, and regarded me as a victim dressed out for sacrifice, called to me--'What, Wilberforce, is that you?' Selwyn quite resented the interference, and turning to him, said in his most expressive tone--'Oh, sir, don't interrupt Mr Wilberforce, he could not be better employed.' Nothing could be more harmonious than the style of those clubs--Fox, Sheridan, Fitzpatrick, and all your leading men frequented them, and associated upon the easiest terms. You either chatted, played at cards, or gambled, as you pleased."