Poetic Obituaries: The burial of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey

was in effect a sufficient answer to his own philosophy. It was a strange spectacle touched with something of the bleak irony of a scene from his own "Dynasts." It would be merely conventional to pretend that his burial was anything but what Thomas Hardy's own family affirmed it to be. And it had something of the effect that might have been produced by the burial of Gibbon in the Holy Sepulchre with Voltaire as one of the pall-bearers. It was the funeral of a man who had been loaded with earthly honors for his exposition of their emptiness and for his affirmation that they never came to those who deserved them.

from The Guardian: 17 January 1928: Thomas Hardy's funeral

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