It is said that Frederick Greenwood, then editing the _Cornhill_, picked up a copy of “Under the Greenwood Tree” on a railway bookstall and, reading it, was moved to commission the author to write him a serial; and when “Far from the Madding Crowd” appeared anonymously in _Cornhill_ its intimate acquaintance with rural England misled the knowing ones into ascribing it to George Eliot--an amazing deduction, seeing that it has nothing in common with George Eliot, either in manner or design. “A Pair of Blue Eyes” had preceded “Far From the Madding Crowd,” and “The Hand of Ethelberta” followed it; then, in 1878, came “The Return of the Native,” which, with “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “The Woodlanders,” stood as Hardy’s highest achievements until, in 1891 and 1896, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure” went a flight beyond any that had gone before them and placed him incontestibly with the world’s greatest novelists. Soon after Hardy had definitely turned from architecture to literature he went back to Wessex, where he lived successively at Cranbourne, Sturminster, and Wimborne, until in 1885 he removed to Max Gate, Dorchester, which has been his home ever since. And through all those years, instead of going far afield in search of inspiration, he recreated the ancient realm of the West Saxons and found a whole world and all the hopes, ambitions, joys, loves, follies, hatreds--all the best and all the worst of all humanity within its borders. The magic of his genius has enriched the hundred and forty square miles of Wessex, which stretches from the Bristol Channel across Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Wilts and Hampshire to the English Channel, with imaginary associations that are as living and abiding, as inevitably part of it now, as are the facts of its authentic history. A grim, stoical philosophy of life is implicit alike in Hardy’s poetry and stories, giving a strange consistency to all he has written, so that his books are joined each to each by a religion of nature that is in itself a natural piety. He sees men and women neither as masters of their fate nor as wards of a beneficent deity, but as “Time’s laughing-stocks” victims of heredity and environment, the helpless sport of circumstance, playing out little comedies or stumbling into tragedies shaped for them inexorably by some blind, creative spirit of the Universe that is indifferent to their misery or happiness and as powerless to prolong the one as to avert the other. The earlier pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies have their roots in this belief, which reaches its most terribly beautiful expression in the epic tragedies of “Tess” and “Jude the Obscure.”