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tells us the theme that may be developed and the theme that offers no opportunities for development. A writer who describes an omnibus after having said it was red lacks the literary instinct. And I think that even if we overlook the extraordinary number of grammatical mistakes, we find the essential Mr Hardy in the description of Fanny Robin's grave. It has become a habit to limit style to a choice of words; but it's much more. We can have style though the choice of words may be casual and undistinguished. Pater speaks of style as unity of subject and language; there was something else, too, but having forgotten what is the third quality that makes for style I will add something of my own: that style is a summary of all the writer has seen and heard and thought, wherefore if the style be confused and turgid the story will limp painfully from a feeble beginning to a dim and confused close.

Freeman: If you do not like Far From the Madding Crowd I am afraid you will not like The Trumpet Major, and I doubt if your patience will bear you to the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge. It begins well, but halfway through—

Moore: I do not propose to read Daniel Deronda, and neither do I propose to read all Mr Hardy's novels, for has it not been said that to have eaten a crust of bread is to have tasted of all the stars? I have read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and my doubts began when Alec came riding by and called her to jump up behind him, and rode away with her into a wood. A wood may be large or small; it may wander hither and thither, or grow in patches. A wood may be dense, dark, solemn, forbidding, or it may be blithe, enticing, with delightful interspaces; it may be overgrown with scrub, littered with uncouth rocks, or it may be smooth. A wood may have the wet, close smell of an ancient marsh, or it may be fragrant as a garden.

Freeman: It was not the wood that mattered, but Tess, and a long description—

Moore: A wood may be described in two words. When Scott wrote: "Land of brown heath and scraggy wood," we are in Scotland. But the woods and fields that Mr Hardy speaks of are never before our eyes. I think he tells us that Alec rode some distance into the wood and made a couch for Tess in the dead leaves. He buttons his overcoat round her shoulders and