When Cecil went to London, he found that "people had supped full of horrors, during the Revolution, and were now devoted to elegiac measures. My languid smile and hazel eyes were the very thing to settle the business of the devoted beings left for execution." Of course all the women fell desperately in love with him. "I had always a predisposition to woman-slaughter, with extenuating circumstances, as well as a stirring consciousness of the exterminating power," he explains to us. Like Childe Harold and Vivian Grey, this coxcomb soon became weary of London, and travelled through Europe in an indolent way, for after all it was his chief pleasure "to lie in an airy French bed, showered over with blue convolvulus," and read tender billets from the ladies. This book was an excellent antidote to the Byronic fever, then at its height. In her _Sketches of English Character_, Mrs. Gore describes different men who were in her time to be met with in the social life of London. The Dining-Out Man thus speaks for himself: "Ill-natured people fancy that the life of a dining-out man is a life of corn, wine, and oil; that all he has to do is to eat, drink and be merry. I only know that, had I been aware in the onset of life, of all I should have to go through in my vocation, I would have chosen some easier calling. I would have studied law, physic, or divinity." In the sketches of _The Clubman_, she assigns John Bull's dislike of ladies' society as the reason for the many clubs in the English metropolis: "While admitting woman to be a divinity, he chooses to conceal his idol in the Holy of Holies of domestic life. Duly to enjoy the society of Mrs. Bull, he chooses a smoking tureen, and cod's head and shoulders to intervene between them, and their olive branches to be around their table.... For John adores woman in the singular, and hates her in the plural; John loves, but does not like. Woman is the object of his passion, rarely of his regard. There is nothing in the gaiety of heart or sprightliness of intellect of the weaker sex which he considers an addition to society. To him women are an interruption to business and pleasure." Mrs. Gore could also unveil hypocrisy. In her novel _Preferment, or My Uncle the Earl_, she thus describes a worthy ornament of the church: "The Dean of Darbington glided along his golden railroad--'mild as moonbeams'--soft as a swansdown muff--insinuating as a silken eared spaniel. His conciliating arguments were whispered in a tone suitable to the sick chamber of a nervous hypochondriac, and his strain of argument resembled its potations of thin, weak, well-sweetened barley water. While Dr. Macnab succeeded with _his_ congregation by kicking and bullying them along the path of grace, Dr. Nicewig held out his finger with a coaxing air and gentle chirrup, like a bird-fancier decoying a canary." A critic in the _Westminster Review_ in 1831 thus writes of her: