nt refers more to the high quality of other
pages than to any positive decay of power or finish here. There is no
less adroitness of touch and penetration of view in this book than
elsewhere, and the poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in
giving poetic value to minute conditions of life which have escaped less
careful observers. But in _Satires of Circumstance_ the ugliness of
experience is more accentuated than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our
face with less compunction. The pieces which give name to the volume are
only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them is very
frequently repeated in other parts of the collection. That spirit is one
of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every case by presenting a
beautifully draped figure of illusion, from which the poet, like a
sardonic showman, twitches away the robe that he may display a skeleton
beneath it. We can with little danger assume, as we read the _Satires of
Circumstance_, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as they seem, that
Mr. Hardy was passing through a mental crisis when he wrote them. This
seems to be the _Troilus and Cressida_ of his life's work, the book in
which he is revealed most distracted by conjecture and most overwhelmed
by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of human hope have been
poisoned for him by some condition of which we know nothing, and even
the picturesque features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have always
before dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention:--

"Bright yellowhammers
Made mirthful clamours,
And billed long straws with a bustling air,
And bearing their load,
Flew up the road
That he followed alone, without interest there."

The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this
mood, is "The Newcomer's Wife," with the terrible abruptness of its last
stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work
of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these
monotonously sinister _Satires of Circumstance_ there can be no
question; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which gave birth to
them does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to lessen the
rebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one must
welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have
wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter in
history.

In the fou