Lansdowne was pronounced to be so absorbed in generalization as to fail in all practical matters, and Sydney Smith to be a great naturalist--"never so happy as when arranging his birds and fishes." "Sir," said the divine, with a stare of comical stupidity, "I don't know a fish from a bird;" and the chancellor of the exchequer was conscious that "all the fiddle-faddle of the cabinet" was committed to him on account of his love of what he called practical business. Crabb Robinson, on one of his visits to the British Gallery, where a collection of English portraits was exhibited, was displeased to see the name of the hated Jeffreys put to a "dignified and sweet countenance, that might have conferred new grace on some delightful character." Consistently enough with the delineation of the portrait, Evelyn recorded in his Memoirs that he "saw the Chief Justice Jeffreys in a large company the night before, and that he thought he laughed, drank, and danced too much for a man who had that day condemned Algernon Sidney to the block." An eminent gentleman who inspected the portraits of Luther and Melancthon, as they appear on their monuments in Wittenberg, describes the countenance of the latter as "acute and sarcastic." "Had subtlety and craft been his qualities, I should have thought the portrait expressed them." It is related of one of the philanthropists of France, who at one time held no insignificant place in the government, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband's life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel's tail, he exclaimed, "Good heavens, madame, have you, then, no humanity?" In the palace Doria, said Willis, there is a portrait of "a celebrated widow" (so called in the catalogue) by Vandyck,--a "had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap, with hands wonderfully painted." The custodian told the visitor that it was "a portrait of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify her excessive vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the picture until she was older, and, at the time of his death, it had become a flattering likeness, and was carefully treasured by the widow." Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that Lord Anson, from his countenance, must have been a very wise man. Horace Walpole, who knew Lord Anson well, said he was the most stupid man he ever knew. Until a few years ago, it is stated, a portrait at Holland House was prescriptively reverenced as a speaking likeness of Addison, and a bust was designed after it by a distinguished sculptor. It turns out to be the copy of a portrait of a quite different person from the "great Mr. Addison."