lligraphy, 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.
Byro