As Professor Windle says: "Whilst peopling these scenes with the creatures of his imagination, Mr. Hardy has achieved a feat which he was probably far from contemplating when he first commenced his series of novels. For incidentally he has resuscitated, one may even say re-created, the old half-forgotten kingdom of Wessex." Although there is scarcely any portion of the county that does not figure in one or other of Mr. Hardy's novels or poems, yet by far the greater number of scenes lie in the portion called South Dorset, around and below an imaginary line drawn from a little to the west of Dorchester to Poole Harbour, and it is mainly with this portion of the Hardy country that it is proposed to deal in this volume. Like all the true beauty spots of England, increasing familiarity with these south-country landscapes deepens their ineffaceable impression as it multiplies their alluring charms; and, small as is the geographical extent of this strip of rural England, it yet fills our thoughts as it delights our eyes; and it is large enough to attract us by a thousand threads of history and romance, by a hundred beauties of rolling downs and grassy vales, and of steep chalk cliffs where the blue waters of the Channel break with a splutter of spray. For miles one can wander amid such scenes in this fair Wessex land, where the roses of dawn fade into the infinite azure of a cloudless sky, and the cool salt breath of the sea-borne air is an elixir of life. Moreover, these soft sea breezes, that temper the dazzling heat of the summer sun, waft in their train an unfading wreath of memories of that antique civilization which existed long before the prows of the Roman galleys clove the ethereal mists that fringe the Dorsetian seas. Mr. Hardy is unique among English novelists in that he writes of ecclesiastical and domestic architecture with the eye and the knowledge of a trained architect, and one who took high honours in this profession before he abandoned it for literature. To this no doubt are due the descriptions he has given us of the homes and haunts of his heroes and heroines. Occasionally we find that a house of the novels has been made up of two or more neighbouring dwellings, at other times there is some slight transposition of site or locality; but to all intents and purposes Mr. Hardy's Wessex of romance is the Dorset of reality, with regard both to its natural scenery and to the buildings that accompany it. Thus it is that the novelist's architectonic settings, and his literal descriptions of natural scenery, make identification a simple task, and lend interest to numerous old houses and cottages, just as they have immortalized a thousand scenes of their author's native land.