What he admired in whatever form--even when incompatible with society--was purpose with personality. This is manifest in all his early novels, conspicuous in his later ones. The two heroes of _Venetia_--Byron and Shelley[157]--are portrayed from this point of view. Even the hysterical purpose of Lady Caroline Lamb in the person of “Lady Monteagle” is recognised; and of Byron he causes his characters to speak in _Vivian Grey_: “There was the man! And that such a man should be lost to us at the very moment that he had begun to discover why it had pleased the Omnipotent to have endowed him with such powers!”--“If one thing were more characteristic of Byron’s mind than another, it was his strong, shrewd common sense, his pure, unadulterated sagacity.”--“The loss of Byron can never be retrieved. He was indeed a real man; and, when I say this, I award him the most splendid character which human nature need aspire to.”[158] The very intellectual purpose of comparative purposelessness, of dilettante taste, attracted him. This is how he addresses “Luttrell” in _The Young Duke_: “... Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, and that splendour is not heart. Teach us that taste is a talisman which can do greater wonders than the millions of the loan-monger. Teach us that to vie is not to rival; and to imitate not to invent. Teach us that pretension is a bore. Teach us that wit is excessively good-natured, and, like champagne, not only sparkles, but is sweet.[159] Teach us the vulgarity of malignity. Teach us that envy spoils our complexions, and that anxiety destroys our figure. Catch the fleeting colours of that sly chameleon, Cant, and show what excessive trouble we are ever taking to make ourselves miserable and silly. Teach us all this, and Aglaia shall stop a crow in its course, and present you with a pen, Thalia hold the golden fluid in a Sévres vase, and Euphrosyne support the violet-coloured scroll.” So, too, the energetic personality of D’Orsay aroused his enthusiastic friendship, and drew from him, some twenty years after that ambrosial figure had vanished, the tribute of “... the most accomplished and the most engaging character that has figured in this century, who, with the form and universal genius of an Alcibiades, combined a brilliant wit and a heart of quick affection, and who, placed in a public position, would have displayed a courage, a judgment, and a commanding intelligence which would have ranked him among the leaders of mankind.” D’Orsay speaks and acts to the life as “Count Mirabel” in _The Young Duke_. And, in a too unfamiliar passage of _The Young Duke_, he thus also embalms, I fancy,[160] the memory of Lady Blessington’s maligned charm under the veil of “Lady Aphrodite.”