Thomas Hardy In offering its hearty congratulations to Mr. Thomas Hardy upon his eightieth birthday, the "Westminster Gazette"—says: Mr. Hardy has lived to see his works become English classics, to know that they have already shown that they can withstand the passage of time. He has given us not only a complete picture of the life of a countryside, but also a philosophy of life, not so complete, perhaps, but still a valuable contribution modern thought. He has stripped the grimness and tragedy of life bare of consolation, refusing always to prophesy smooth things. Possibly the human mind will reject his conclusions, but it will always value the courage of his analysis, the dramatic truth of the characters he has made to act out for us the irenic tragedy of life, and the prose style in which his works have been written."
Tae Unknown Harpy.
"Thomas Hardy's eightieth birthday finds him securely fixed in his right place as the greatest literary figure of our time, perhaps of all our English times since Shakespeare," says "A Wayfarer" in the "Nation." Certain it is that the divine comedy of English life, first revealed in Chaucer and then seen in Shakespeare's plays, reappears, with the changes of the centuries upon it, in Hardy's novels and poems, and in those memories remains stamped on our consciousness. He has declared the sweetness of mere living, the delights of the human company of rural England, as beautifully and nobly as any! of his forbears. Yet we know little more of the man who wrought these marvels than we know of Shakespeare. Probably the one being was as simple and silent, as modestly withdrawn from ' the curious eye, as the other. Therefore it is good to feel that Hardy's self-built home near Dorchester is a place of pilgrimage for many worshipping thoughts to-day."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.