I should have been disturbed on our first meeting soon after the performance, had it not come as a surprise. I was in Paris, and as I was leaving my hotel one night for some kind of a festivity he popped out of the darkness and shook me by the hand. We parted hastily, I having time for little greeting. “Have a good time, now!” he said as I left, and that old characteristic phrase of his rang in my ears as I walked off down the street. He had said it with his usual cheerful, interested smile and I looked in vain for a found-out expression I had expected to notice in his face. I wondered if he realized what his one false step had meant to our imaginations. For, as I afterwards observed, it was not a question of his brazening it out: he evidently had consigned it to the limbo of to-be-expected mistakes with a shrug of the shoulders and took it for granted that we had done the same. But, however this may be, I saw that he had already begun to build another structure of worship in my esteem at any rate. Already my newly discovered man was disappearing, engulfed as in a very splendid costume which he had removed for a minute. And when next I saw him at home I had again the ancient feeling of being bathed in a warm electric light--that unaccountably had sparks, as well. W. T. BISSELL. _Maurice Hewlett_ In 1893 Mr. Edmund Gosse, with a fine perception of literary tendencies, wrote: “It is my conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adopted the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the lookout to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.” The next year, with “Ebb Tide”, “The Prisoner of Zenda”, and “Under the Red Robe”, the signs were unmistakable, and what the critics have pleased to call the Romantic Revival had begun. It was on the crest of this wave of romanticism that Maurice Hewlett first appeared, and when that wave had spent itself fifteen years later his best work was done. He was at once a child of this movement, exhibiting in varied form its most familiar phases, and a strange free spirit, deriving from no literary movement, a romanticist by nature, not the exigencies of his art. And so, if we feel the influence of the period in “The Forest Lovers”, “The New Canterbury Tales”, “The Fool Errant”, and the rest, it is in “The Queen’s Quair” and in “Richard Yea-and-Nay” that we come upon the very essence of Hewlett’s art, an art which was quite distinctively his own. These two novels he wrote to please himself. They have been called his finest work.