It is the contrast between these two distinct classes of society that saves the book from becoming monotonous. Evelina visits the Pantheon with her West End friends. When Captain Mirvan wonders what people find in such a place, Mr. Lovel, a fashionable fop, quickly rejoins: "What the ladies may come hither for, Sir, it would ill become _us_ to determine; but as to we men, doubtless we can have no other view, than to admire them." At another time Evelina visits the opera with the vulgar Branghtons, who all rejoiced when the curtain dropped, and Mr. Branghton vowed he would never be caught again. The Branghtons at the opera is hardly inferior to Partridge at the play. Tom Branghton is a good representative of his class. He describes with glee the last night at Vauxhall: "There's such squealing and squalling!--and then all the lamps are broke,--and the women skimper scamper;--I declare I would not take five guineas to miss the last night!" All the characters, even the heroine, take delight, in boisterous mirth. Much of the humour of the book consists rather in ludicrous situations than in any real delicacy of wit. Too often the laugh is at another's discomfiture, and so fails to please the present age with its kindlier feeling towards others. Such are the practical jokes which Captain Mirvan plays upon Madame Duval. In one instance, disguised as a robber, he waylays the lady's coach, and leaves her in a ditch with her feet tied to a tree. The many tricks which the doughty Salt plays upon this lady so much resemble some of the humorous scenes in _Joseph Andrews_, and _Tom Jones_ that we may infer the readers of that century found them laughable. The Captain and the French woman are two puppets which serve to introduce much of this horse-play. They are not even caricatures; they are entirely unlike anything in human life. With the exception of these two characters, all the men and women who provoked the mirth of the heroine are well portrayed. Miss Burney is less felicitous in her descriptions of serious characters. Lord Orville, the same type of man as Sir Charles Grandison, is true only in the sense that Miss Burney announces the truth of the entire book. "I have not pretended to show the world what it actually _is_, but what it _appears_ to a girl of seventeen," she wrote in the preface to _Evelina_. Lord Orville, all dignity, nobility, charm, and perfection, is but the ideal of a young girl.