Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/53

 worthily by the noted antiquary, Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, son of Major Bartholomew Price Hardy, and author of A Catalogue of the Lords Chancellors, Keepers of the Great Seal, Masters of the Rolls and Officers of the Court of Chancery.

Less distinguished than the Jersey, military, naval or London Hardys were those scions of the original John Le Hardy who elected to remain in the neighborhood of the Frome Valley. They preferred the simple delights of a quiet, secure existence in the well-wooded, lush countryside, to tumult, the chatter of guns, intrigue and overweening honors. Such a one was the Thomas Hardy who lived in Melcombe Regis, a small hamlet north of Dorchester and east of Cerne Abbas, towards the end of the Sixteenth Century. He was a man of merely local importance, and is commemorated by a tablet in St. Peter's Church in Dorchester, as a benefactor to the borough, to which he bequeathed a yearly sum of £50 for charitable purposes. Before he died, in 1599, he had founded the primary school in the Dorset capital.

The significance of even so brief a journey as this through the complex ramifications of an ancient family may perhaps be disputed with a considerable show of reason. But in Hardy's case such a procedure has a certain importance. He has frequently been called a "man of the people," and his sympathetic penetration into the delicious workings of the peasant's mind has often been attributed to the fact that his ancestry ramified endlessly