Ferment (1863-1870)
setting, properly restricted in time and space, was already there, to fulfil the last of the Aristotelian requirements of the prose epic.
Finally, a broad comprehension of all the more important activities of the human mind: this must be examined in a few of its details, as it worked itself out during the quarter-century which followed.
Hardy's independent reading, for instance, was distinguished from the start for its thoroughness and depth. Take the Bible. Hardly any writer of our day has shown as close an acquaintance with the Bible as has Hardy—with both the Old and New Testaments. Not only is this shown in the great frequency of his direct quotation—a kind of pious demonstration of familiarity with the Scriptures considerably cheapened since Satan himself first showed the purposes to which it could be applied—but in many a turn of phrase that could have become ingrained into his own style only through the most enthusiastic and persistent perusal of the King James version. When Hardy was once asked his opinion on the question of the effect of the war upon literature, he referred his questioners to a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In addition to his familiarity with the Bible, he showed at times more than a slight smattering of the methods and materials of ecclesiastical argumentation. In his Memories of Church Restoration he related his own personal experiences with a strict Protestant bishop's objections, on purely church-doctrinal grounds, to the erection of a new rood-screen in a church in which the old one had been removed and destroyed by an ignorant builder. Likewise young George Somerset's acquaint-
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