Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett

Pepys’s Diary covers ten years of his life, his twenty-seventh to his thirty-eighth. They would be critical years in the life of any married man, particularly when, as was the c...

Our own name for the wild daffodil is Lent Lily, a beautiful and sufficient one, and, to judge by the poets again, the plant has been well distributed. Shakespeare saw it in War...

There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting...

Meantime the city was beleaguered, and very soon hungry. Cauldrons of broth and boiled horse were set up at street-corners, and people fought each other to get at them; bread wa...

He has done it with the unfailing humour and neatness which carried him in and out of the lawcourts, took him to prison and enlarged him again. And he was then only forty-four,...

The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationali...

These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no re...

“O man of consequence and many affairs,” he says to _Clitiphon_, “when you in your turn have need of my good offices, walk into my lonely study. The philosopher is at your servi...

The end of the book is perfectly original. When her grief and remorse have worn themselves out, what is to prevent the lovers coming together? A curious blend in her of piety an...

Neither Scott nor Dickens succeeded with heroes and heroines; but Scott has a girl to his credit whose reality is historical: Jeannie Deans. I cannot listen to a doubt about tha...

I cannot bring myself to be that whole-hearted kind of reformer who says, my sauce must be your sauce, or there is no health for the world. If I must provide a villager (as sure...

Not only do we take babies seriously, but we take each other so. The first is enforced upon us by custom, which is simply the unwritten village law; the other comes about by cir...

After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs, asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the folly, to say worse things about him...

“‘Be good enough to note,’ he says in one of them, ‘that none of the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic--only chance samples of folk you may see pass your window...

How nearly the latter-day, strictly modern method allies the novel to the story of Cambuscan bold, I have no space left in which to tell the strictly modern reader--who also kno...

“In my opinion you do not understand the laws of friendship aright. ’Tis generally believed it owes its birth to an agreement and conformity of humours, and that it lives no lon...

Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with the homely instincts, the longing for t...

James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus Co...

_Lovers of Mr. Hewlett’s work will understand that these Essays have not been subjected to the severe revision which Mr. Hewlett would undoubtedly have given them before publica...

I have left myself no room in which to treat of nurserymen’s tulips, and the less the pity in that they can talk of them so eloquently themselves. There is a Dutch grower who si...