Leigh Hunt praises Mr. Mathews’s valets and old men, but condemns his nervous restlessness and redundance of bodily action. While Munden, Liston, and Fawcett could not conceal their voices, Mathews rivalled Bannister in his powers of mimicry. His delineation of old age was remarkable for its truthfulness and variety. Leigh Hunt confesses that till Mathews acted Sir Fretful Plagiary, he had ranked him as an actor of habits and not of passions, and far inferior to Bannister and Dowton; but the extraordinary blending of vexation and conceit in Sheridan’s caricature of Cumberland proved Mathews, Mr. Hunt allowed, to be an actor who knew the human heart.[339] In 1820 Hazlitt criticised Mathews’s third entertainment, “The Country Cousins,” a mélange of songs, narrative, ventriloquism, imitations, and character stories. He had left Covent Garden on the ground that he had not sufficiently frequent opportunities for appearing in legitimate comedy. The severe critic says, “Mr. Mathews shines particularly neither as an actor nor a mimic of actors; but his forte is a certain general tact and versatility of comic power. You would say he is a clever performer--you would guess he is a cleverer man. His talents are not pure, but mixed. He is best when he is his own prompter, manager, performer, orchestra, and scene-shifter.”[340] Hazlitt then goes on to accuse his “subject” of a want of taste, of his gross and often superficial surprises, and of his too restless disquietude to please. “Take from him,” says Hazlitt, “his odd shuffle in the gait, a restless volubility of speech and motion, a sudden suppression of features, or the continued repetition of a cant phrase with unabated vigour, and you reduce him to almost total insignificance.” It should be said that his “shuffle” was rather a “limp.”