From long and frequent converse with works of any favourite author, we often grow to thinking of them under some symbol or image; to see them summed up and expressed in some one composite scene of our own making; this is my ‘vision’ of Mr. Hardy’s works. A rolling down country, crossed by a Roman road; here a gray standing stone, of what sacrificial ritual origin I can but guess; there a grassy barrow, with its great bones, its red-brown jars, its rude gold ornament, still safe in earth; a broad sky burning with stars; a solitary man. It is of no use to turn away, and to think of the village farms and cottages, with their antique ways and looks; of the deep woods, of the fall of the woodman’s axe, the stir of the wind in the branches; of the rustic feasts and festivals, when the home-brewed drink goes round, to the loosening of tongues and wits; of the hot meadows, fragrant hayfields, cool dairies, and blazing gardens; of shining cart-horses under the chestnut-trees and cows called in at milking time: they are characteristic scenes, but not the one characteristic scene. That is the great down by night, with its dead in their ancient graves, and its lonely living figure; ... There is, perhaps, a reek about it all of a too-conscious imitation of Pater’s murmured obituaries which makes one in the end rather tired of this hieratic treatment of art, so that one turns rather gladly to the one or two tales he wrote. For example in _The Lilies of France_, an episode of French anti-clericalism, which appeared in _The Pageant_, 1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same quarterly he perpetrated a delightful ironism on the literary men of his period entitled _Incurable_, in which, perhaps, we may trace faint autobiographical clues. Such, briefly, was the work of this young man who was found dead in Fleet Street early one morning, aged thirty-five.