Canto of the Story of Rimini for classic elegance and natural feeling to any equal number of lines from Mr. Southey’s Epics or from Mr. Moore’s Lalla Rookh.  In a more gay and conversational style of writing, we think his Epistle to Lord Byron on his going abroad, is a masterpiece;—­and the Feast of the Poets has run through several editions.  A light, familiar grace, and mild unpretending pathos are the characteristics of his more sportive or serious writings, whether in poetry or prose.  A smile plays round the features of the one; a tear is ready to start from the thoughtful gaze of the other.  He perhaps takes too little pains, and indulges in too much wayward caprice in both.  A wit and a poet, Mr. Hunt is also distinguished by fineness of tact and sterling sense:  he has only been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue.  What then is the drawback to so many shining qualities, that has made them useless, or even hurtful to their owner?  His crime is, to have been Editor of the Examiner ten years ago, when some allusion was made in it to the age of the present king, and that, though his Majesty has grown older, our luckless politician is no wiser than he was then!

[Footnote A:  Compare his songs with Burns’s.]

[Footnote B: 

  “There was a little man, and he had a little soul,
  And he said, Little soul, let us try,” &c.—­

Parody on

  “There was a little man, and he had a little gun.”—­

One should think this exquisite ridicule of a pedantic effusion might have silenced for ever the automaton that delivered it:  but the official personage in question at the close of the Session addressed an extra-official congratulation to the Prince Regent on a bill that had not passed—­as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were to justify them.]

* * * * *

ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON.

So Mr. Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate themselves; and as their lucubrations under one or other of these noms de guerre have gained considerable notice from the public, we shall here attempt to discriminate their several styles and manner, and to point out the beauties and defects of each in treating of somewhat similar subjects.

Mr. Irvine is, we take it, the more popular writer of the two, or a more general favourite:  Mr. Lamb has more devoted, and perhaps more judicious partisans.  Mr. Irvine is by birth an American, and has, as it were, skimmed the cream, and taken off patterns with great skill and cleverness, from our best known and happiest writers, so that their thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like “the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow:”  he succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a sort of prescriptive title and traditional