Immediately after the publication of _Desperate Remedies_, which seemed to teach him, as _Endymion_ taught Keats, the highest mysteries of his art, Mr. Hardy entered upon a period of brilliant and splendid production. In three successive years, 1872, 1873, and 1874, he produced three masterpieces--_Under the Greenwood Tree_, _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, and _Far from the Madding Crowd_; followed four years later by what is, perhaps, his greatest contribution to literature, _The Return of the Native_. Even in literary careers that last a long time, there seem to be golden days when the inspiration is unbalked by obstacles. It is interesting to contemplate the lengthy row of Scott's novels, and then to remember that _The Heart of Midlothian_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_ and _Ivanhoe_ were published in three successive years; to recall that the same brief span covered in George Eliot's work the production of _Scenes of Clerical Life_, _Adam Bede_, and _The Mill on the Floss_; and one has only to compare what Mr. Kipling accomplished in 1888, 1889, and 1890 with any other triennial, to discover when he had what the Methodists call "liberty." Mr. Hardy's career as a writer has covered about forty years; omitting his collections of short tales, he has written fourteen novels; from 1870 to 1880, inclusive, seven appeared; from 1881 to 1891, five; from 1892 to 1902, two; since 1897 he has published no novels at all. With that singular and unfortunate perversity which makes authors proudest of their lamest offspring, Mr. Hardy has apparently abandoned the novel for poetry and the poetic drama. I suspect that praise of his verse is sweeter to him than praise of his fiction; but, although his poems are interesting for their ideas, and although we all like the huge _Dynasts_ better than we did when we first saw it, it is a great pity from the economic point of view that the one man who can write novels better than anybody else in the same language should deliberately choose to write something else in which he is at his very best only second rate. The world suffers the same kind of economic loss (less only in degree) that it suffered when Milton spent twenty years of his life in writing prose; and when Tolstoi forsook novels for theology.