HEWLETT, MAURICE HENRY English novelist, was born on Jan. 22, 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 the year 1891. 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 mediaeval England. In the same year he printed the pastoral and pagan drama of Pan and the Young Shepherd, 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 a close knowledge of mediaeval Italy. The new and vivid portraits of Richard Coeur de Lion in his Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900), and of Mary, queen of Scots, in The Queen's Quair (1904) showed real historical sense. The New Canterbury Tales (190I) 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 (19o5), two are Italian tales, and The Fool Errant (1905) purports to be the memoirs of Francis Antony Stretley, citizen of Lucca.
Other novels followed, but his main interest was directed to verse. The Song of the Plow (1916) is one of the most consider able English narrative poems of the new century; it describes the fortunes of the English farm labourers from the earliest times down to the present, and contains many fine passages. Other poems were The Village Wife's Lament and The Lore of Proserpine (1913) . The popularity of his earlier fiction perhaps accounts for the limited appreciation of the real strength and originality of his later work. He died on June 15, 1923, at Broad Chalke, near Salisbury.