The Architect (1856-1863)
Hardy lived to repent rather bitterly this ignorant and innocent sharing of his in the abominable "movement." He publicly lamented it many years later, when he addressed the General Meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, on June 20, 1906. He looked back with shame and horror upon the wanton wrecking of venerable chronicles in stone, and discussed the feasibility of effecting some sort of compromise between the practical and poetically minded persons: between the users and the musers.
He told several interesting anecdotes in connection with the exposition of his reaction to the architectural practices of 1860. There were, for instance, two brothers, who returned to their native village after an absence of many years. They visited their old church, and were soon engaged in a heated argument concerning the position of the family pew—an argument terminated only by Hardy’s explanation of the removal of an entire arch, upon which one of them remarked, "Then I'm drowned if I'll ever come into the paltry church again, after having such a paltry trick played upon me."
Tampering with the headstones both inside the churches and outside in the churchyards was a practice that particularly excited Hardy’s indignation; and it excited his imagination, too. He told of the removal of the monumental stone from over the grave of a venerable vicar who had abjured women, and of its erection
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