Arthur Sturgis Hardy (December 14, 1837_June 13, 1901) was a lawyer and Liberal politician who served as Ontario's fourth Premier from 1896 to 1899. Hardy was first elected to the Ontario legislature in 1873 and was promoted to the Cabinet of Sir Oliver Mowat in 1877 as Provincial Secretary. In 1889 as Commissioner of Crown Lands, Hardy established Algonquin Park. Entering his sixties and having been in government for over twenty years, Hardy lacked the energy and strength to take the government forward or excite the populace. In the 1898 election Hardy's government was returned with a narrow six seat majority due to the collapse of the agrarian Patrons of Industry party which had served as the Liberal's allies in the legislature. Exhausted and needing money, Hardy retired from politics in 1899 and died two years later.
Hardy could not afford to pursue a scholarly career as he wished and was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local church architect.
Hardy’s vision reflects a world in which Victorian complacencies were dying but its moralism was not, and in which science had eliminated the comforting certainties of religion.
His ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, but his heart is buried separately, with a certain dark propriety, near the Egdon Heath made famous by his novels.
Hardy's marriage had also suffered from the public outrage - critics on both sides of the Atlantic abused the author as degenerate and called the work itself disgusting.
Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors in 1909.
Hardy kept to his marriage with Emma Gifford although it was unhappy and he had - or he imagined he had - affairs with other women passing briefly through his life.
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