One of the striking things about these Novels is the sense that they convey of the largeness of life. The action moves on a narrow stage set with the austere simplicity of the Elizabethans; the personages are extremely commonplace, the incidents in the main small and unexciting. Yet the tremendousness of human fate is constantly implied and brought home in the most impressive way. This is because all have spiritual value; if the survey be not wide, it sinks deep to the psychic center; and what matters vision that circles the globe, if it lacks grasp, penetration, uplift? These, Hardy has. When one calls his peasants Shaksperian, one is trying to express the strength and savor, the rich earthy quality like fresh loam that pertains to these quaint figures, so evidently observed on the ground, and lovingly lifted over into literature. Their speech bewrays them and is an index of their slow, shrewd minds. Nor is his serious characterization less fine and representative than his humorous; especially his women. It is puzzling to say whether Hardy's comic men, or his subtly drawn, sympathetically visualized women are to be named first in his praise: for power in both, and for the handling of nature, he will be long remembered. Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess and the rest, they take hold on the very heart-strings and are known as we know our very own. It is not that they are good or bad,--generally they are both; it is that they are beautifully, terribly human. They mostly lack the pettiness that so often fatally limits their sex and quite as much, they lack the veneer that obscures the broad lines of character. And it is natural to add, while thinking of Hardy's women, that, unlike almost all the Victorian novelists, he has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on woman's involvement with sex-passion; he finds that love, in a Wessex setting, has wider range than has been awarded it in previous study of sex relations. And he has not hesitated to depict its rootage in the flesh; not overlooking its rise in the spirit to noblest heights. And it is this un-Anglo-Saxon-like comprehension of feminine humanity that makes him so fair to the sinning woman who trusts to her ruin or proves what is called weak because of the generous movement of her blood. No one can despise faithful-hearted Fannie Robin, dragging herself to the poorhouse along Casterbridge highway; that scene, which bites itself upon the memory, is fairly bathed in an immense, understanding pity. Although Hardy has thus used the freedom of France in treatment, he has, unlike so much of the Gallic realism, remained an idealist in never denying the soul of love while speaking more truthfully concerning its body than the fiction-makers before him. There is no finer handling of sex-love with due regard to its dual nature,--love that grows in earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven--than Marty's oft-quoted beautiful speech at her lover's grave; and Hardy's belief