Moore was by universal consent the very best of company; a talker who delighted in the give and take of conversation, and was at least as well pleased with other people's wit as his own. He had perhaps the less occasion to be jealous, having in his singing a resource which made him unrivalled. This talent, however, he would only use in a mixed company--"hating this operation with he-hearers," as he notes somewhere of a men's dinner when he was forced to depart from his habit. To women and for them he sung, while his singing powers lasted; but it is not unfair to say that he valued women in society chiefly as decorative accessories and as an audience. Among the innumerable good things noted in his Diary, hardly one is credited to a woman. And, well as he liked singing to a mixed audience, it is clear that his chief pleasure, as he advanced in life, lay in the society of men. With men, his intimacies were numerous enough, for Moore was as popular in clubs as in drawing-rooms, and most of his intimates were persons of title. Byron said that "Tommy dearly loved a lord"; and a hundred people know this saying, for one who has seen Byron's sincerer utterance (not published in Moore's edition of the _Life and Letters_):--"I have had the kindest letter from Moore. I do think that man is the best-hearted--the only _hearted_ being I ever encountered; and his talents are equal to his feelings." It is therefore worth while to note that Moore by no means loved any or every lord. He did, however, certainly desire to associate with those who possessed hereditary station and had the brains to make a generous use of it, both in acquiring power and in drawing to their houses men like Moore himself--or Sydney Smith, whom Moore loved better to meet than any lord, except perhaps Lord John Russell. His deliberate opinion, stated more than once in the Diary, was that in his time the most agreeable and also the purest tone of society was to be found at the top of the social ladder. And in point of fact he was admitted to intimacy with the Whig aristocracy in its most brilliant day. Bowood and Holland House, as Moore knew them, were probably the best things of their kind that England has ever seen. For a description of the charm which made him not only welcome but courted in these great houses, it would be hard to better that set down by Haydon the painter, in his autobiography:--