Those who dissent from Byron’s _dictum_ that Keats was “snuffed out by an article” usually add that no author was ever killed by criticism; yet there seems little doubt that the critics killed Thomas Hardy the novelist, and our only consolation is that from the ashes of the novelist, phœnix-like rose Thomas Hardy the Poet. As a novelist, Hardy began and finished his career in the days of Victoria, but though he has only been asserting himself as a poet since then, his earliest verse was written in the sixties; his first collection of poetry, the “Wessex Poems,” appeared in 1898, and his second in the closing year of the Queen’s reign. These facts should give us pause when we are disposed to…
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