As Lionel Johnson said of Scott, so he might have said of Maurice Hewlett: “In him the antiquarian spirit awoke a passion, instead of a science.” Hewlett was mystically touched by the beauty of the Middle Ages and by the beauty of the Renaissance. He was a mediaevalist, a quattrocentist par excellence, but above all this, or perhaps, better, as a physical embodiment of all this, he loved Italy with a passionate, sensitive love. It was this love for Italy which so subtly affected his character and gave to his novels their color and their warmth, although strange enough very little of his life was spent in Italy and little of his best work deals with its history or its people. It was of England that he wrote in “The Queen’s Quair”, of England and the Crusades in “Richard Yea-and-Nay”. So, if we grant to his affection for Italy and her art the warmth and color of his novels, we must look for their life, their vitality, to this same England and his understanding love of her past, his oneness in spirit with even the simplest of those characters which moved across the broad canvas of her history. It is not for me to say that either the color and warmth of Italy’s art or the life and vitality of England’s past were exclusively the foundation stones of Hewlett’s art. His novels are, all of them, rich with intermingled threads like tapestry--not the heavy brocaded tapestry of the poet Spenser, but a tapestry brilliant, yet often misty and confused, that was quite his own. His backgrounds he built of hundreds of figures, quickly and sharply etched in a manner remarkably reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory and Froissart. Against this background which he had created with so lavish a care he laid his greater figures--and I think of Richard and John Lackland and the old King, Henry the Second, from “Richard Yea-and-Nay”--figures which he had limned with broad, bold strokes and touched with a quiet wit. The effect is not only that of tapestry but of old stained glass. We marvel how the simple, splendid figures stand out and are yet a part of a delicately wrought background. But in the movement of these greater figures before so complex a background lay the weakness of Hewlett’s art. He knew the pageantry and color of the lives he wrote about, but it was not given him to read deeply beneath the gaily painted surface they presented. The movement of his characters through the unfolding scenes of his romances is not puppetry. Hewlett’s touch was too fresh, too original for that. It is only that we see in part, whereas if he had had the power the whole would be revealed to us. In his greatest novel, and in that novel almost alone, the veil is lifted for a few moments. In those moments I think he knew Richard.