Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844

The volumes of which we are about to give fragments and anecdotes, contain a portion of the letters addressed to a man of witty memory, whose existence was passed almost exclusively among men and women of rank; his life, in the most expressive sense of the word, West End; and even in that West End, his chief haunt St James's Street. Parliament and the Clubs divided his day, and often his night. The brilliant roués, the steady gamesters, the borough venders, and the lordly ex-members of ex-cabinets, were the only population of whose living and breathing he suffered himself to have any cognizance. In reverse of Gray's learned mouse, eating its way through the folios of an ancient library—and to whom

to George Selwyn, the world and all that it inhabits, were concentrated in Charles Fox, William Pitt, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the circle of men of pleasantry, loose lives, and vivacious temperaments, who, with whatever diminishing lustre, revolved round them.

Of the City of London, Selwyn probably had heard; for though fixed to one spot, he was a man fond of collecting curious knowledge; but nothing short of proof positive can ever convince us that he had passed Temple Bar. He, of course, knew that there were such things on the globe as merchants and traders, because their concerns were occasionally talked of in "the House," where, however, he heard as little as possible about them; for in the debates of the time he took no part but that of a listener, and even then he abridged the difficulty, by generally sleeping through the sitting. He was supposed to be the only rival of Lord North in the happy faculty of falling into a sound slumber at the moment when any of those dreary persons, who chiefly speak on such subjects, was on his legs. St James's, and the talk of St James's, were his business, his pleasures, the exciters of his wit, and the rewarders of his toil. He had applied the art of French cookery to the rude material of the world, and refined and reduced all things into a sauce piquante —all its realities were concentrated in essences; and, disdaining the grosser tastes of mankind, he lived upon the aroma of high life—an epicure even among epicures; yet not an indolent enjoyer of the luxuries of his condition, but a keen, restless, and eager student of pleasurable sensations—an Apicius, polished by the manners, and furnished with the arts of the most self-enjoying condition of mankind, that of an English gentleman of fortune in the 18th century.

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The Heretic . Translated from the Russian of Lajétchnikoff. By T.B. Shaw, B.A. of Cambridge. In three volumes.

A jeu de mots impossible to be rendered in English; Kourítza , in Russian, is a 'hen.'"—T.B.S.

"When Vladímir, to convert the Russians to Christianity, caused the image of their idol Peróun to be thrown into the Dniépr, the people of Kíeff are said to have shouted ' vuiduibái, bátioushka, vuiduibái !'—bátioushka signifies 'father;' but the rest of the exclamation has never been explained, though it has passed into a proverb."—T.B.S.

Nástia —the diminutive of Anastasia; Nástenka, the same. Russian caressing names generally end in sia, she, óusha, or óushka—as Vásia, (for Iván;) Andrióusha, (Andrei;) Varpholoméoushka, ( Bartholomew.)"—T.B.S.

George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, with Memoirs and Notes . By T.H. Jesse. 4 vols.