We don’t visit them.’” “Sybil” herself, it should be remembered, is an aristocrat born, but not bred, while half “Egremont’s” Norman relations are cads or snobs. He loved, too, society’s foibles--to hit off the precocious wiseacres of the golden youth. “... A young fellow of two- or three-and-twenty knows the world as men used to do after as many years of scrapes. I wonder whether there is such a thing as a greenhorn? Effie Crabbs says the reason he gives up his house is that he has cleaned out the old generation, and that the new generation would clean him.”[162] To banter “those uncommonly able men who only want an opportunity,” the philosophers and the puppies; to jest, as he does in _Popanilla_, at legal fictions; to poke fun at the “great orator, before a green table, beating a red box,” or the prattlers on science in “gilded saloons;” to depict the pyramidal selfishness but unruffled pride of Lord Hertford in “Lord Monmouth”--Thackeray’s “Lord Steyne;” to chronicle the pæan of “Mrs. Guy Flouncey”--a precursor of “Becky Sharp”--when she wins the invitation to the great house: “My dear, we have done it at last!” or those whose _summum bonum_ is to have ten thousand a year and be thought to have five; or those waiters on dying Mammon, who, when the will is read, “all become orderly and broken-hearted;” or the bored good humour of the Radical noble, who was almost a Communist except as regarded land--“as if a fellow could have too much land;” to burlesque the whole medley of blue bores and bore-blues, of red-tape, and peas-on-drums, the Jacks-in-office and the Jacks-in-boxes, of “nobs and snobs,” of “statesmen, fiddlers, and buffoons.” But it should not be forgotten that he ever kept a warm place in his heart for sailors, whom he regarded as among the most natural and delightful of mankind.[163] It was not only the big shams and little follies of society that revolted or amused him. He held, also, that melancholy and dulness were social crimes. “If a man be gloomy, let him keep to himself. No man has a right to go croaking about society, or, what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief. These fellows should be put in the pound. We like a good broken heart or so now and then; but then one should retire to the Sierra Morena mountains and live upon locusts and wild honey, not dine out with our cracked cores....”[164] And among breaches of social tact, he most disliked those minor monomanias which make the bore. “Never,” he once warned a young man, “discuss ‘The Letters of Junius,’ or ‘The Man in the Iron Mask.’” Some of his happiest conversations are to be found in the _Lothair_ colloquies at Muriel Towers.