Novelist and poet who first met RB in 1880. For his ‘lifelong and intense’ engagement with RB’s work, see Shires (2012, pp. 583–584); the evening before he died he asked Florence Hardy to read ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ to him and listened with ‘wistful intentness’ (Hardy [1933], 2.265). He shares RB’s often unconventional diction and was drawn to his ‘ironized, morally mixed speakers and to his multiple points of view’ (Shires [2012], p. 600). The irony of ‘The Statue and the Bust’ ‘anticipates Hardy’s mordant satires on fidelity in love’ (Langbaum [1989], p. 21). Langbaum explores links between many other works including ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ and Hardy’s ‘The Temporary the All’ (pp. 16–17). The Dynasts (1904–1908) is comparable to Ring in its exploitation of history, ‘fracture and multiple perspectives’ (Shires [2012], p. 602 n.24). But Hardy wondered, to *Gosse in 1899, ‘How could smug Christian optimism worthy of a dissenting grocer find a place inside a man who was so vast a seer & feeler when on neutral ground’ (Hardy [1978–2012], 2.216).