We have no idea of entering into any of the scandals of the time. The lives of all the men of fashion of that day were habitually profligate. The "Grand Tour" was of but little service to their morals, and Pope's sarcastic lines were but too true. "He travell'd Europe round, And gather'd every vice on foreign ground; Till home return'd, and perfectly well-bred, With nothing but a solo in his head; Stolen from a duel, follow'd by a nun, And, if a borough choose him--not undone." But this vice did not descend among the body of the people. It was limited to the idlers of high life, and even among them it was extinguished by the cessation of our foreign intercourse at the French revolution; or was at least so far withdrawn from the public eye, as to avoid offending the common decencies of a moral people. Selwyn was probably more cautious in his habits than his contemporaries, for he survived almost every man who had begun life with him; and he lived to a much greater age than the chief of the showy characters who rose into celebrity during his career. He died at the age of seventy-two, January 25, 1791. He had long relinquished gaming, assigning the very sufficient reason, "It was too great a consumer of four things--time, health, fortune, and _thinking_." But what man of his day escaped the gout, and the natural termination of that torturing disease in dropsy? After seven years' suffering from both, with occasional intervals of relief, he sank at last. Walpole, almost the only survivor among his early friends, thus wrote on the day of his expected death:--"I have lost, or am on the point of losing, my oldest acquaintance and friend, George Selwyn, who was yesterday at the extremity. Those misfortunes, though they can be so but for a short time, are very sensible to the old: but him I loved, not only for his infinite wit, but for a thousand good qualities." He writes a few days after, "Poor Selwyn is gone; to my sorrow; and no wonder. Ucalegon feels it." Selwyn, with all his pleasantry, had evidently a quick eye for his own interest. He contrived to remain in parliament for half a century, and he gathered the emoluments of some half dozen snug sinecures. Among those were the Registrar of Chancery in Barbadoes, and surveyor-general of the lands. Thus he lived luxuriously, and died rich.