does not on a closer inspection turn out an opaque substance.  This is a charge that none of his friends will bring against Mr. Leigh Hunt.  He improves upon acquaintance.  The author translates admirably into the man.  Indeed the very faults of his style are virtues in the individual.  His natural gaiety and sprightliness of manner, his high animal spirits, and the vinous quality of his mind, produce an immediate fascination and intoxication in those who come in contact with him, and carry off in society whatever in his writings may to some seem flat and impertinent.  From great sanguineness of temper, from great quickness and unsuspecting simplicity, he runs on to the public as he does at his own fire-side, and talks about himself, forgetting that he is not always among friends.  His look, his tone are required to point many things that he says:  his frank, cordial manner reconciles you instantly to a little over-bearing, over-weening self-complacency.  “To be admired, he needs but to be seen:”  but perhaps he ought to be seen to be fully appreciated.  No one ever sought his society who did not come away with a more favourable opinion of him:  no one was ever disappointed, except those who had entertained idle prejudices against him.  He sometimes trifles with his readers, or tires of a subject (from not being urged on by the stimulus of immediate sympathy)—­but in conversation he is all life and animation, combining the vivacity of the school-boy with the resources of the wit and the taste of the scholar.  The personal character, the spontaneous impulses, do not appear to excuse the author, unless you are acquainted with his situation and habits—­like some proud beauty who gives herself what we think strange airs and graces under a mask, but who is instantly forgiven when she shews her face.  We have said that Lord Byron is a sublime coxcomb:  why should we not say that Mr. Hunt is a delightful one?  There is certainly an exuberance of satisfaction in his manner which is more than the strict logical premises warrant, and which dull and phlegmatic constitutions know nothing of, and cannot understand till they see it.  He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew who puts us in mind of Sir John Suckling or Killigrew or Carew; or who united rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility.  Mr. Hunt ought to have been a gentleman born, and to have patronised men of letters.  He might then have played, and sung, and laughed, and talked his life away; have written manly prose, elegant verse; and his Story of Rimini would have been praised by Mr. Blackwood.  As it is, there is no man now living who at the same time writes prose and verse so well, with the exception of Mr. Southey (an exception, we fear, that will be little palatable to either of these gentlemen).  His prose writings, however, display more consistency of principle than the laureate’s:  his verses more taste.  We will venture to oppose his Third