1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hewlett, Maurice Henry

HEWLETT, MAURICE HENRY (1861–  ), English novelist, was born on the 22nd of January 1861, the eldest son of Henry Gay Hewlett, of Shaw Hall, Addington, Kent. He was educated at the London International College, Spring Grove, Isleworth, and was called to the bar in 1891. From 1896 to 1900 he was keeper of the land revenue records and enrolments. He published in 1895 two books on Italy, Earthwork out of Tuscany, and (in verse) The Masque of Dead Florentines. Songs and Meditations followed in 1897, and in 1898 he won an immediate reputation by his Forest Lovers, a romance of medieval England, full of rapid movement and passion. In the same year he printed the pastoral and pagan drama of Pan and the Young Shepherd, shortened for purposes of representation and produced at the Court Theatre in March 1905, when it was followed by the Youngest of the Angels, dramatized from a chapter in his Fool Errant. In Little Novels of Italy (1899), a collection of brilliant short stories, he showed again his power of literary expression together with a close knowledge of medieval Italy. The new and vivid portraits of Richard Cœur de Lion in his Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900), and of Mary, queen of Scots, in The Queen’s Quair (1904) showed the combination of fiction with real history at its best. The New Canterbury Tales (1901) was another volume of stories of English life, but he returned to Italian subjects with The Road in Tuscany (1904); in Fond Adventures, Tales of the Youth of the World (1905), two are Italian tales, and The Fool Errant (1905) purports to be the memoirs of Francis Antony Stretley, citizen of Lucca. Later works were the novel The Stooping Lady (1907), and a volume of poems, Artemision (1909).