LATE THOMAS HARDY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 48, Issue 83, 18 January 1928, Page 5

LATE THOMAS HARDY.

ASHES INTERRED IN ABBEY. A DISTINGUISHED GATHERING. (Per Press Association—Copyright.) LONDON, January 16. The creator of Tess joined the immortals in the Poets' Corner amid a demonstration of national homage recalling the funerals of Charles Dickens and of Lord Tennyson. That the novelist's well-loved Wessex might partake of the ever-enduring honour, a clod of Wessex earth was mmgled with the London clay in which the casket containing the ashes rests. A great queue early gathered for admission to the nave, and later the south transept was filled by literary notables, representing numerous societies with which the late Mr Hardy had been associated as the acknowledged head of English letters. , . , Every seat was filled by two o clock, when the singing of a choir heralded the procession bearing the casket, covered by a white and' golden pall, from St Faith's Chapel to the Sanctuary. Holding the fringes of the pall on either side walked Mr Baldwin Mr Ramsay MacDonald, Mr Rudyard Kipling, Sir Edmund Gosse, Professor A. E Housman, Sir James Barne, MiBernard Shaw, Mr John Galsworthy, and representatives' of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Then came Mrs Hardy, bowed with-grief and heavily veiled. , . . The service was of the simplest, consisting of the 23rd Psalm, followed by a passage from Ecelesiastes: "Let us now praise famous men." . Then the pall - bearers accompanied the coffin to the grave, next to Dickens's, where the burial service was completed, closing with Newmans "Lead, Kindly Light" and Handel s Dead March in "Saul." . Thousands' of Londoners during the rest of the day passed the tiny casket which was surrounded by scores ot wreaths. , . Meanwhile a service much more characteristic of Hardy's message was taking place at Stinsford, in Mellstock Church, the village choir singing the hymns that Mr Hardy loved, to the accompaniment of a harmonium. When the heart had been buried in the shadow of a yew tree in the churchyard, the national tribute to the creator of the Wessex tales was complete.

ABSENCE OF ROYAL FAMILY. ARNOLD BENNETT'S CRITICISM. LONDON, January 16. Mr Arnold Bennett, the author, in a letter to the' "Daily Express," con-i demns the arrangement by which the distribution of tickets for the Poet s Corner at Mr Hardy's funeral was handed over to Macmillans, the publishers. He says the Dean and Chapter cannot divest themselves of the responsibility of organising a national funeral. They are not entitled to say, 'We have consented to interment m the Abbey. Invite whom you like Lastly, Mr Bennett states that he must point out with regret and respect that not a single member ot the Royal family was present. One ot the main functions of Royalty, he says, is to represent and symbolise the feeling of the country. As a rule, that function is admirably fulfilled, but the Kind's message to the widow, though a suitable sympathetic gesture, was not enough. Mr, Hardy was a citizen of the 'highest consequence. 11 it had been a military funeral of smaller importance, half the male members ot the Royal family would have attended as a matter of course. '