When we read that Milnes ‘made a conquest of society,’ it must not be supposed that he was a mere pleasure-seeker. On the contrary, as Mr Reid says in another place, ‘he had too great a reverence for what was good and pure and true, too consuming a desire to hold his own with the best intellects of his time, and, above all, too deep a sympathy with the suffering and the wronged to allow him to fall a victim to these temptations.’ From the first, then, he ‘sought to combine the world of pleasure and the world of intellect.’ A list of his friends would contain the names of the best-known men of the day, but, at the same time, men who had but little in common: Carlyle, Sterling, Maurice, Spedding, Thackeray, Tennyson, Landor, Hallam, Rogers, Macaulay, Sydney Smith. ‘He became an intimate member of circles differing so widely from each other as those of Lansdowne House, Holland House, Gore House, and the Sterling Club’; and as a host he was notorious for mingling together the most discordant social elements. Disraeli sketched him in _Tancred_ under a disguise so thin that nobody could fail to penetrate it: ‘Mr Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr Vavasour’s breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or merit—one might almost add, your character—you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced. He prided himself on figuring as the social medium by which rival reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust’ (vol. i. p. 337). When some one asked if a celebrated murderer had been hanged, the reply he got was: ‘I hope so, or Richard will have him at his breakfast-table next Thursday;’ and Thirlwall, when his friend was on the brink of marriage, thus alludes to past felicity: ‘It is very likely, nay certain, that you will still collect agreeable people about your wife’s breakfast-table; but can I ever sit down there without the certainty that I shall meet with none but respectable persons? It may be an odd thing for a Bishop to lament, but I cannot help it’ (vol. i. p. 448). After all it seems probable that Milnes himself, and not the lion of the hour, was the chief attraction at those parties. He delighted in the best sort of conversation—that which he called ‘the rapid counterplay and vivid exercise of combined intelligences,’ and he did his best to revive the practice of that almost forgotten art—_l’art de causer_. As Mr Reid says: