Gentlemen and ladies are not the special care of Thomas Hardy, and yet he has done well by them: witness Elfride Swancourt, passionate, thwarted Eustacia Vye, the Earl of Uplandtowers, Barbara Grebe, who married him, Swithin St. Cleeve, merely a curate’s son, and Lady Viviette Constantine, who loved him. One of Hardy’s tricks is to match with stout Saxon words others that come from Greece or Rome or Judea, as Cytherea Aldclyffe, Damon Wildeve, Aeneas Manston, Bathsheba Everdene. The effect is like that of the ruins of Roman Britain which always stand behind the scene to lend it depth and tragic atmosphere. And the Saxon words have hints in them. Caroline Aspent is a trembling, uncertain creature, like Thomas Leaf; Donald Farfrae is a wanderer from his own heath; Gabriel Oak will not bend; Sue Bridehead carries into middle age the shock and fear of the bride. Philology, ready servant of art, makes the difference between Smollett’s stolid rustics and such as Anne Garland, Fancy Day, Tabitha Lark, Phyllis Grove, Diggory Venn, Giles Winterbourne, and Thomasin Yeobright. Philology, too, makes the comedy more subtle in comic names which Shakespeare could not better: Laban Tall, Joseph Poorgrass, Cain Ball, whose mother had misheard the scripture, Anthony Cripplestraw, the distressed lovers Suke Damson and Tim Tangs, Tony Kytes, who wooed too many, and Unity Sallet, who declined him. Not even to speak of his dialect and place names, which are unspeakably rich, Thomas Hardy’s well-christened children are enough to show that his knowledge goes to the roots of the language. Of all these, smaller novelists being left out for brevity, which have been conscious of the full savour and perfume of their syllables? What traits come out in the choice? What had the age of each of them to do with it? Who saw the sober hues in Defoe and Richardson, the candid puns of Fielding and Smollett, the large fecundity of Scott, the hugeness and exuberance of Dickens, the polyglot mockeries of Thackeray, the flash and fragrance of Meredith, the deep, native colour of Thomas Hardy? Words, words, words! PICTURES OF THE PAST