The New York herald., 1922-04-23

WILTSHIRE ESSAYS. BY Maurice
Hewlett. Humphrey Milford, Oxford
University Press.
TN delightful little book, friendly
in the hand and gently edifying
to the mind, Mr.. Maurice Hew-
lett collects some thirty-odd of his
short contributions to reviews and
newspapers under the title "Wrt-
shire Essays" In his preface he
says he calls them so because they
were all written in my country and
many of them are directly concerned
with it. Some of them deal with the
doings of my neighbors as 1 view
them from here; some deal with lit
erature as think about 1t here"
This predatory chapter has the
heading ION Oneself" and in it Mr..
Hewlett comments with fairly good
humor upon the general determine
tion Of the public to expect every
thing he writes to refer back, some
how. to "The Forest Lovers" though
more than twenty-five years have
passed since he sang the praises Of
youth in Italy. He alludes, ruefully,
to somebody who expected to find
"a swashbuckling romance" in one
OF his new books. (Surely Mr. Hew-
lett should be generous enough to
forgive a reader so suffused with a
glorious and gleeful memory Of
"Brazenhead the Great" that he
longed for more!) Il have been told"
says he. that a man changes the
entire habit of his body periodically
in a term of years. May he not
change his mind? Must he not, if he
is to keep pace? / don't say that
he should do it as often as Mr.. Wells,
who seems to change his opinions
with his shirt; but in twenty-five or
thirty years he should have shifted,
or man is limpet."
He goes on, in tolerant crescendo
of humility. to confess his growing
and now accomplished-insen
ness, in some degree, to criticism of
details. ending with the sentence:
Lord, what is mann That is the
cry when you are sixty" If 1t be
true that weight of years actually
bears upon his head, let him remem-
Der that other sexagenarians run of
the opinion that they are approach
ing "the last of life for which the
first was planned" and are quite set
upon keeping a twinkle in their see-
ing eye, even If it be sometimes
hidden from the general by the
obtrusive machinery Of the optician.
These polished pieces of writing.
the expression of a cultivated mans
maturity, range through literature,
politics and the various aspects of
human life, seen with truest percep-
ton. He sees straight, and his eye
is clear. Most of these chapters
sound like the unconscious precipi-
tate of years spent in sympathetic
watching all sorts and conditions of
the plain people," in Lincoln's
phrase. His point of view is that of
the detached observer only in that
the educated man instinctively be-
holds intellectually, however gen.
erous and overfiowing may be his
sympathy with and genuine affection
for the CLINT of gold in humanity
whenever he sees it; and it is often
enough. He sees fundamentals; in
such a perception as "Manege," the
strong virtue of handiwork-no less
than in the gayer pages of 1.-THE
Great Affair" or Select Conversa-
tions with a Blackbird." And this
is why his hope and faith in Eng
lands future turn, surely as the sun.
flower, to what he calls the peasantry
of England. An American somehow
always thinks of those groups of the
people as yeomanry rather than as
peasants. For there is a difference.
His moments of confusion in what
God allows to happen are reflected