Selwyn, GEORGE AUGUSTUS, bishop, was born 5th April 1809. He was educated at Eton and at Cambridge. He rowed in the first inter-university boat-race (1829), and was a great pedestrian and swimmer, athletic powers found very serviceable in after life. In 1841, while curate of Windsor, he was consecrated first and only bishop of New Zealand and Melanesia—now divided into seven sees. On the voyage out he studied Maori and navigation, so that he could preach to the natives in their own tongue on his arrival, and could steer his own vessel on his missionary voyages. He visited every portion of his huge diocese before setting about his great work of organising it. A visit to England in 1854 brought back John Coleridge Patteson, afterwards the martyred bishop of Melanesia, to whose see Bishop Selwyn's second son was consecrated in 1877. In 1867 Bishop Selwyn attended the first Pan-Anglican Synod at Lambeth, and against his own inclinations was appointed Bishop of Lichfield—the see of the Black Country—where upon his initiative the first Diocesan Conference in which the laity were duly represented met in 1868, and where he died 11th April 1878. A devoted churchman, with love to God and loyalty to his sovereign and his archbishop as his guiding principles, he thought no duty too humble, no act of kindness too trifling, and no work to which he was sent too difficult to undertake. Possessing in a special degree the gift of organisation, and always regarding himself as 'a man under authority,' he expected the same soldier-like obedience from those under him. He did much to make Lichfield the life-giving, spiritual heart of the diocese, and so fulfil his high ideal of the cathedral system.
See Life by Rev. H. W. Tucker (2 vols. 1879) and (more popular) Life by Rev. G. H. Curteis (1 vol. 1889). For Selwyn College, see CAMBRIDGE, Vol. II. p. 670.