He said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written ‘his shape _smalled_ in the distance.’ Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough—only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer’s _Iliad_, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire the _Iliad_ greatly. Why, it’s in the _Marmion_ class!’ Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.) We went off the next day, but there was more talk at breakfast before we went. Hardy was at the critics again. He was complaining that they accused him of pessimism. One man had recently singled out as an example of gloom a poem he had written about a woman whose house was burned down on her wedding-night. ‘Of course it is a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that. When I read his criticism I went through my last collection of poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C, according as they were sad, neutral or cheerful. I found them as nearly as possible in equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion _vers libre_ could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’ About his own poems he said that once they were written he cared very little what happened to them. He told us of his work during the war, and said that he was glad to have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he said, ‘but it was a hundred times better than sitting on a military tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.’ This was the last time we saw Hardy, though we had a standing invitation to come and visit him.