Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/122

 but I put 'em here to keep out the weather: they might keep my blackguard hands serious at the same time, but they don’t.' A fair lady with a past was once heard to say that she could not go to morning service at a particular church because the parson read one of the Commandments with such accusatory emphasis: whether these had been degraded to the condition of old materials and were taken down owing to kindred objections one cannot know."

The most memorable section of the reminiscential address, and the one that showed how Hardy’s intense poetic vision could be applied to the commonest and simplest of objects, was his contemning of the barbarous practice of cutting off the "cannons" of church bells wherever a bell-peal was remounted. "I was passing," he said, "through a churchyard where I saw standing on the grass a peal of bells just taken down from the adjacent tower and subjected to this treatment. A sight more piteous than that presented by these fine bells, standing disfigured in a row in the sunshine, like cropped criminals in a pillory, as it were ashamed of their degradation, I have never witnessed among inanimate things."

Throughout the address, while viewing with dismay the necessity for the destruction or removal of old materials in the decaying sections of ancient buildings, Hardy insisted on the preservation of the original form and ornamentation of the structure; for, he remarked, "This is indeed the actual process of organic nature herself, which is one of continuous substitution. She is always discarding the matter, while retaining the form."

Nor was this particular lecture the only tribute which