"How contradictory it seems," remarked Washington Irving, writing of Oliver Goldsmith, "that one of the most delightful pictures of home and homefelt happiness should be drawn by a homeless man; that the most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the married state should be drawn by a bachelor who had been severed from domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching, and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made by a man whose deficiencies in all the graces of person and manner seemed to mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex." Byron thought it contradictory that the ancients, in their mythology, should have represented Wisdom by a woman, and Love by a boy. "Don't you know," urged Sydney Smith, "as the French say, there are three sexes--men, women, and clergymen?" In the old church at Hatfield, in England, amongst the antiquities, there is a recumbent statue, which every one believed was a woman, till Flaxman, the sculptor, examined it, and satisfied himself that it was a priest. Madame De Stael's Delphine was thought to contain a representation of Talleyrand in the character of an old woman. On her pressing for his opinion of that work, he said, "That is the work--is it not?--in which you and I are exhibited in the disguise of females?" Bulwer seemed to Harriet Martineau "a woman of genius, inclosed by misadventure in a man's form." A lady, speaking of the works of the poet Thomson, observed that she could gather from his writings three parts of his character: that he was an ardent lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent. Savage, to whom the remark was addressed, assured her that, in regard to the first, she was altogether mistaken; for the second, his friend was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and as to the third, he indulged in every luxury that came within his reach. Holmes states, in the preface to Elsie Venner, that while the story was in progress, he received the most startling confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like that he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception. Mrs. Hawthorne said that men who had committed great crimes, or whose memories held tragic secrets, would sometimes write to her husband, or even come great distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, which made them regard him as the father confessor for all hidden sins. The Swedenborgians informed Poe that they had discovered all that he said in a magazine article, entitled Mesmeric Revelations, to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt his veracity,--a thing which, in that particular instance, he never dreamed of not doubting himself. Lord Lansdowne and Sydney Smith, with a companion or two, went incognito to Deville, the phrenologist in the Strand, to have their characters read from their skulls, and were most perversely interpreted. Lord