who are too
important to be put off with Christmas cards, and not important enough
to be supplied with gifts of a calculable value.

One must praise the immense spirit and vivacity of scenes where
something in the nature of a struggle, a moral duel, goes on. In such
passages every power at the writer's command is needed; unerring
directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an
athlete's garments fit the body. Everything must count, and the
movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. The
chess-playing scene between Elfride and Knight in _A Pair of Blue
Eyes_ is an illustration. Sergeant Troy displaying his skill in
handling the sword--weaving his spell about Bathsheba in true snake
fashion, is another example. Still more brilliant is the gambling
scene in _The Return of the Native_, where Wildeve and Diggory Venn,
out on the heath in the night, throw dice by the light of a lantern
for Thomasin's money. Venn, the reddleman, in the Mephistophelian garb
of his profession, is the incarnation of a good spirit, and wins the
guineas from the clutch of the spendthrift husband. The scene is
immensely dramatic, with its accompaniments of blackness and silence,
Wildeve's haggard face, the circle of ponies, known as heath-croppers,
which are attracted by the light, the death's-head moth which
extinguishes the candle, and the finish of the game by the light of
glow-worms. It is a glorious bit of writing in true bravura style.

His books have a quality which I shall venture to call 'spaciousness,'
in the hope that the word conveys the meaning I try to express. It is
obvious that there is a difference between books which are large and
books which are merely long. The one epithet refers to atmosphere, the
other to number of pages. Hardy writes large books. There is room in
them for the reader to expand his mind. They are distinctly
out-of-door books, 'not smacking of the cloister or the library.' In
reading them one has a feeling that the vault of heaven is very high,
and that the earth stretches away to interminable distances upon all
sides. This quality of largeness is not dependent upon number of
pages; nor is length absolute as applied to books. A book may contain
one hundred pages and still be ninety-nine pages too long, for the
reason that its truth, its lesson, its literary virtue, are not
greater than might be expressed in a single page.

Spaciousness is in even less degree dependent upon mile