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 gentlemanly behavior of the time, the Brontë sisters of the comic tragedy of wild and lonely lives. Matthew Arnold was mellowing the world he saw, illusory at best, through the faintly rose-hued spectacles of academic Oxford, with its Christianized classical paganism. All these attractive forces continued to function, with ever decreasing vigor.

The glories of the Victorian compromise and self-justification were all conveniently at hand, and London was properly revelling in them. Complacent contemplation of steady, undisturbing achievement was the order of the day. That complacency had but few more years to live, for all its strength and solid building upon the seemingly substantial loam of a steady view towards a good order of things.

This London, and Thomas Hardy, diligently beginning his architectural apprenticeship, were inevitably drawing together. The Spirit of the Years was observing the slow ordering of a portentous convergence of the twain.