In my opinion Robert (“Fleshly School”) Buchanan's The Drama of Kings (1871) exerted so strong an influence on Hardy's Dynasts that it deserves to be regarded as the immediate source of that work. The contention would appear to be virginal. The biographies and critical studies of Abercrombie, Blunden, Brennecke, Chakravarty, Chew, Duffin, Florence Emily Hardy, Hedgcock, Holland, McDowall, Rutland, South-worth, Symons, Weber, and Webster provide, in their greatly varying degree, suggestions as to the philosophical and literary background of Hardy's trilogy. None of them, however, suggests any relation between The Dynasts and The Drama of Kings. In fact none of them even mentions the name of Robert Williams Buchanan with the exception of Edmund Blunden, who notes the interesting fact that Buchanan dedicated to Hardy his novel, Come Live with Me and Be My Love. He might also have observed that Buchanan elsewhere devotes a laudatory poem to Hardy and warmly praises “Tom Hardy” in another poem.