taken from a song in Shakespeare's As You Like It (Act II, Scene V), and a subtitle, A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. Having received a discouraging reply from Macmillan, to whom he offered the manuscript in 1871, Hardy accepted an offer from the ultimate publisher, Tinsley, of £30 for the copyright. Later, when Hardy had become more established, he attempted to retrieve the copyright but declined to pay Tinsley's quoted price of £300; the copyright was to remain with the publisher and his successors until after Hardy's death. Publication Under the Greenwood Tree was published by Tinsley on 15 June 1872, with the author's name not appearing on the first edition. The novel was published in the United States in June 1873 by Holt & Williams, and was serialised there the following year. When the book was republished in the UK in 1912 by Macmillan, the full title became Under the Greenwood Tree, or, The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. Criticism and analysis The book was well reviewed on its publication, receiving special praise for its freshness and originality. Sometimes grouped with Hardy's lesser novels, Under the Greenwood Tree is also recognised by critics as an important precursor to his major works. In his 1872 review of the novel for the Saturday Review, the critic Horace Moule, one of Hardy's mentors and friends, called it a "prose idyll", and that judgement has stuck. While the novel closes on an ambiguous and even sceptical note, it is nevertheless distinguished among Hardy's fiction—particularly his Wessex novels—for its relative happiness and amiability. For the critic Irving Howe, Under the Greenwood Tree served as a kind of necessary prequel and establishing myth for the world of Wessex that Hardy depicted in subsequent tragic works: the novel, he argued, "is a fragile evocation of a self-contained country world that in Hardy's later fiction will come to seem distant and unavailable, a social memory by which to judge the troubled present." Hardy’s 2006 biographer Claire Tomalin praised Hardy for the beauty and precision of his descriptive writing, and noted that the book has charmed generations of readers. Indeed, she said, there are always readers who go to him primarily to immerse themselves in “the Dorset woodlands, streams and rivers, fields and meadows, cottages and churches, soft skies and birdsong”. Tomalin considered the villagers to be drawn sympathetically, and with beautifully