21 JANUARY 1928, Page 3

,Monday the ashes of Thomas Hardy were laid in Poets'

Corner, Westminster Abbey. They lie by the side of 'Dickens and are surrounded by the tombs of Johnson, Thickeray, Macaulay, Tennyson and Browning. The pall bearers were the Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, Mr. Kipling, Sir James Barrie, Mi. Bernard Shaw, Sir Edmund Gosse, Mr. A.. E. Housman, Mr: John Galsworthy, Mr. A. B. Ramsay (Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge) and Dr. E. M. Walker (Pro-Provost of Queen's College, Oxford). At the same time Hardy's heart was buried in the churchyard at Stinsford, the Dorset village which readers of Hardy's novels identify with Mellstock.