Byron’s iconoclastic tendencies showed themselves also in his attack on English society, in which he aimed to expose the selfishness, stupidity, and affectation of the small class that represented the aristocratic circle of the nation. In dealing with this subject he knew of what he was speaking, for he had been a member and a close observer of “that Microcosm on stilts yclept the Great World.” His picture of this upper class is humorous and ironic, but seldom vehement. In a series of vivid and often brilliant character sketches he delineates the personages that Juan, Ambassador of Russia, meets in London, touching cleverly on their defects and vices, and unveiling the sensuality, jealousy, and deceit which their outward decorum covers. Though the figures are types rather than individuals, they were in many cases suggested by men and women whom Byron knew. Possibly the most effective satire occurs in the description of the gathering at Lady Adeline’s country-seat, Norman Abbey, where some thirty-three guests, “the Brahmins of the Ton,” meet at a fashionable house party.[297] For these social parasites and office seekers Byron felt nothing but contempt. His advice to Juan moving among them is: “Be hypocritical, be cautious, be Not what you _seem_, but always what you _see_.”[298] He describes their life as dull and uninteresting, a gay masquerade which palls when all its delights have been tried. Its prudery conceals scandal, treachery, and lust; its great vices are hypocrisy and cant--“cant political, cant religious, cant moral.”[299] Indeed the satire of _Don Juan_, from Canto XI to the point where the poem is broken off, is an attack on pretence and sham, and a vindication of the free and natural man. Byron’s motive may have been, in part, the desire for revenge on the circle which had cast him out; but certainly he was disgusted with the narrowness and conventionality of his London life, and his newly acquired jesting manner found in it a suitable object for satire. While Byron’s liberalism and democracy were doing effective service in pointing out flaws in existing political and social systems, he was still maintaining, not without many inconsistencies, his old conservative doctrines in literature, and doggedly insisting on the virtue of his literary commandments: “Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.”[300]