after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more after that of “Hypatia,” “Romola,” and “Fathers and Sons,” it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, the conflicting ideals of the old and new generations.  The printing-press is being set up, and the hero finds his art of calligraphy, learned in the scriptorium, no longer in request.  The Pope and many of the higher clergy are infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarian enthusiasm of the Renaissance.  The child Erasmus is the new birth of reason, destined to make war on monkery and superstition and thereby avenge his parents’ wrongs.  Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism is Mr. Hewlett’s story—­sheer romance.  The wonderful wood of Morgraunt, with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, black meres frowned over by skeleton castles, and gentle hinds milked by the heroine to get food for her wounded lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal as Spenser’s fairy forest.  Through its wild ways Isoult la Desirous and Prosper le Gai go adventuring like Una and her Red Cross knight, or Enid and Geraint.  Or, again, Isoult in her page’s dress, and forsaken by her wedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or Constance in “Marmion,” or any lady of old romance.  Or sometimes again she is like a wood spirit, or an elemental creature such as was Undine.  The invented place names, High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, etc., with their transparent air of actuality, sound an echo from William Morris’ prose romances, like “The House of the Wolfings” and “The Sundering Flood.”  As in the last named, and in Thomas Hardy’s “Return of the Native,” the reader’s imagination is assisted by a map of the Morgraunt forest and the river Wan.  Mr. Hewlett has evidently profited, too, by recent romances of various schools:  by “Prince Otto,” e.g., and “The Prisoner of Zenda,” and possibly by others.  His Middle Ages are not the Middle Ages of history, but of poetic convention; a world where anything may happen and where the facts of any precise social state are attenuated into “atmosphere” for the use of the imagination.  “The Forest Lovers” is nearer to “Christabel” or “La Belle Dame sans Merci” than to “Ivanhoe”:  is, indeed, a prose poem, though not quite an allegory like “Sintram and his Companions.”

Among Scott’s contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, profoundly romantic in temper, were not retrospective in their habit of mind; and the Middle Ages, in particular, had little to say to them.  Scott stood for the past; Byron—­a man of his time, a modern man—­for the present; Shelley—­a visionary, with a system of philosophical perfectionism—­for the future.  Memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, was the nurse of Scott’s genius.  Byron lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise.  Shelley prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age.  We have found, in Byron’s contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of his instinctive sympathy with the classical and