adventures founded on a
balance of conscience and instinct, is constantly exemplified in those
ballads and verse-anecdotes which form the section of his poetry most
appreciated by the general public. Among these, extraordinarily
representative of the poet's habit of mind, is "My Cicely," a tale of
the eighteenth century, where a man impetuously rides from London
through Wessex to be present at the funeral of the wrong woman; as he
returns, by a coincidence, he meets the right woman, whom he used to
love, and is horrified at "her liquor-fired face, her thick accents." He
determines that by an effort of will the dead woman (whom he never saw)
shall remain, what she seemed during his wild ride, "_my_ Cicely," and
the living woman be expunged from memory. A similar deliberate electing
that the dream shall hold the place of the fact is the motive of "The
Well-Beloved." The ghastly humour of "The Curate's Kindness" is a sort
of reverse action of the same mental subtlety. Misunderstanding takes a
very prominent place in Mr. Hardy's irony of circumstance; as, almost
too painfully, in "The Rash Bride," a hideous tale of suicide following
on the duplicity of a tender and innocent widow.

The grandmother of Mr. Hardy was born in 1772, and survived until 1857.
From her lips he heard many an obscure old legend of the life of Wessex
in the eighteenth century. Was it she who told him the terrible Exmoor
story of "The Sacrilege;" the early tale of "The Two Men," which might
be the skeleton-scenario for a whole elaborate novel; or that
incomparable comedy in verse, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," with its
splendid human touch at the very end? We suspect that it was; and
perhaps at the same source he acquired his dangerous insight into the
female heart, whether exquisitely feeble as in "The Home-coming" with
its delicate and ironic surprise, or treacherous, as in the desolating
ballad of "Rose-Ann." No one, in prose or verse, has expatiated more
poignantly than Mr. Hardy on what our forefathers used to call "cases of
conscience." He seems to have shared the experiences of souls to whom
life was "a wood before your doors, and a labyrinth within the wood, and
locks and bars to every door within that labyrinth," as Jeremy Taylor
describes that of the anxious penitents who came to him to confession.
The probably very early story of "The Casterbridge Captains" is a
delicate study in compunction, and a still more important example is
"The A