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.