Born, at Bredfield House, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 31 March 1809. At King Edward VI.’s Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, 1821–26. To Trinity Coll., Camb., Oct. 1826; B.A., 1830. Visit to Paris, 1830. Family removed to Ipswich, 1825; to Boulge Hall, near Bredfield, 1835. Intimate friendship with Thackeray and Carlyle. Married Lucy Barton, 1856 [?]. Lived at Farlingay Hall, near Woodoridge, 1853–60; in Woodbridge, 1860–74; at Little Grange, 1874–83. Died, suddenly, at Merton Rectory, Norfolk, 14 June 1883. Buried at Boulge. Works: “Euphranor” (anon.), 1851; “Polonius” (anon.), 1852; Trans. of “Six Dramas” of Calderon, 1853; Trans. of the “Salámán and Absál” of Jánú (anon.), 1856; Trans. of the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” (anon.), 1859; Trans. of Æschylus’ “Agamemnon” (anon.), 1876; Trans. of Calderon’s “Mighty Magician” (anon.), 1877. Posthumous: “Works” (2 vols.), 1887; “Letters and Literary Remains,” ed. by W. Aldis Wright (3 vols.), 1889; “Letters,” ed. by W. A. Wright (2 vols.), 1894; “Letters to Fanny Kemble, 1871–1883,” ed. by W. A. Wright, 1895. He edited: “Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton,” 1842; “Readings in Crabbe,” 1882.

Personal

	Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,
	Where once I tarried for a while,
	Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,
	And greet it with a kindly smile;
	Whom yet I see as there you sit
	Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,
	And watch your doves about you flit,
	And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee,
	Or on your head their rosy feet,
	As if they knew your diet spares
	Whatever moved in that full sheet
	Let down to Peter at his prayers;
	Who live on milk and meal and grass.

  The Poet-Laureate, on hearing of his death, wrote to the late Sir Frederic Pollock: “I had no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit. I had written a poem to him the last week, a dedication, which he will never see.” When Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of his old friends he had loved most, he replied, “Why, dear old Fitz, to be sure; and Brookfield.” And Carlyle, quick of eye to discern the faults and weaknesses of others, had nothing but kindliness, with perhaps a touch of condescension, “for the peaceable, affectionate, and ultra-modest man, and his far niente life.” It was something to have been intimate with three such friends, and one can only regret that more of his letters addressed to them have not been preserved. Of those written to the earliest and dearest friend of all, James Spedding, not one is left. One of his few surviving contemporaries, speaking from a life-long experience, described him with perfect truth as an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it.

  FitzGerald, though shy and retired, was no weakling, and with him taste was no mere capacity for enjoying the graces and refinements of letters. He loved with a constant and ardent affection what is great, noble, and heroic. His friendships with living men were not seldom friendships with the strong—and together with Thackeray, Tennyson, Spedding, Carlyle, we must reckon among the strong his dear lugger captain “who looks,” he says, “in his cottage like King Alfred in the Story.” So, too, in books, in music, in painting, in religion, he was especially attracted by all that is simple, lofty, and heroic.

  FitzGerald’s charities are probably forgotten, unless by the recipients; and how many of them must be dead, old soldiers as they mostly were, and suchlike! But this I have heard, that one man borrowed £200 of him. Three times he regularly paid the interest, and the third time FitzGerald put his note of hand in the fire, just saying he thought that would do. His simplicity dated from very early times. For when he was at Trinity, his mother called on him in her coach-and-four, and sent a gyp to ask him to step down to the college-gate, but he could not come—his only pair of shoes was at the cobbler’s. And down to the last he was always perfectly careless as to dress. I can see him now, walking down into Woodbridge, with an old Inverness cape, slippers on feet, and a handkerchief, very likely, tied over his hat. Yet one always recognised in him the Hidalgo. Never was there a more perfect gentleman. His courtesy came out even in his rebukes. A lady one day was sitting in a Woodbridge shop, gossiping to a friend about the eccentricities of the Squire of Boulge, when a gentleman, who was sitting with his back to them, turned round, and, gravely bowing, gravely said, “Madam, he is my brother.” They were eccentric, certainly, the FitzGeralds. FitzGerald himself remarked of the family: “We are all mad, but with this difference—I know that I am.”

	I chanced upon a new book yesterday:
	I opened it, and, where my finger lay
	’Twixt page and uncut page, these words I read
	—Some six or seven at most—and learned thereby
	That you, Fitzgerald, whom by ear and eye
	She never knew, “thanked God my wife was dead.”
	Ay, dead! and were yourself alive, good Fitz,
	How to return you thanks would task my wits:
	Kicking you seems the common lot of curs—
	While more appropriate greeting lends you grace:
	Surely to spit there glorifies your face—
	Spitting—from lips once sanctified by Hers.

  For many years before his death he made his home at Woodbridge, and when I did read there, his friendly devotion to me and my family was an occasion of some embarrassment to me, for when I came on the platform and courtseyed to my audience, Mr. Fitzgerald got up and bowed to me, and his example being immediately followed by the whole room, I was not a little surprised, amused, and confused by this general courtesy on the part of my hearers, who, I suppose, supposed I was accustomed to be received standing by my listeners. Mr. Aldis Wright, Edward Fitzgerald’s intimate friend, has long promised the reading public his memoirs, in which, if justice is done to him, he will appear not only as one of the ripest English scholars, but as a fine critic of musical and pictorial art, as well as literature.

  [On the planting (October 7, 1893) at the head of Fitzgerald’s grave at Boulge two rose-trees, whose ancestors had “strowed roses” over the grave of Omar Khayyám: “My tomb shall be in a spot where the North-wind may strow roses upon it” (Omar Khayyám to Khwajah Nizami).]

	Hear us, ye winds!
	From where the North-wind strows
	Blossoms that crown “the King of Wisdom’s” tomb,
	The trees here planted bring remembered bloom
	Dreaming in seed of Love’s ancestral Rose
	To meadows where a braver North-wind blows
	O’er greener grass, o’er hedge-rose, may, and broom,
	And all that make East England’s field-perfume
	Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows:
	Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West and South!
	This granite covers him whose golden mouth
	Made wiser ev’n the Word of Wisdom’s King:
	Blow softly o’er the grave of Omar’s herald
	Till roses rich of Omar’s dust shall spring
	From richer dust of Suffolk’s rare FitzGerald.

  His neighbors and dependents knew that under eccentricities of dress and manner, and occasional petulance, there beat the kindliest heart, full of sympathy, of paternal interest in their cares, expressing these in charities wayward, but genuinely helpful, with no sound of trumpet to herald the almsgiving…. A tall, sea-bronzed man, as I remember him, wearing a slouch hat, often tied on with a handkerchief, and wrapped in a big cloak, walking with shuffling gait, hob-nobbing with the beachmen, among whom he had his favorites, recipients of his bounty in boats and gear—everybody knew old Fitz by sight, and many called him “dotty.”… On the death of his mother he married Barton’s only daughter, but, after a short experience of conjugal life, for which he was wholly unsuited, a separation was agreed upon, FitzGerald behaving in the matter of alimony with his usual liberality.

  Our description of his appearance is drawn from recollections of him after he was sixty years of age, and when he began to stoop; but even then he was in height above the medium, and gave the impression of having been a fine, good-looking man in his younger days. He had a melancholy cast of countenance—a mist of despondent sadness hung over his face; a complexion bronzed by exposure to sun and sea air, large nose, deep upper lip, sunken, pale blue eyes and bushy eyebrows, large, firmly closed mouth, dimpled chin, and fine head. About his half-bald head was a comely grace, whilst the fringe of hair on the outskirts was touched by a softened grey, which helped to add to the dignity of his appearance. The expression was severe, that of a man whom you could hardly expect a child to question as to the time of day. Generally he had a dreamy look. His voice, though soft and gentle, was not musical; his manner generally was placid and mild; but when walking along road or street, he was so absorbed in thought, that if addressed, he would answer in a querulous, impatient tone, as though annoyed by impertinent interruption…. He was extremely careless as to his personal appearance, never knowing when to cast off an “old acquaintance,” as he described it, in the shape of hat, coat, or shoes. In texture his clothes resembled that worn by pilots, and presented the appearance of being crumpled and untidy. They were put on anyhow, and made to fit him, he used to say, like a sack. Though so meanly clad, plenty of good apparel was found in his wardrobe after his decease. In walking he slouched awkwardly, always taking the least frequented footpath. He generally carried a stick, very rarely using an umbrella. In cold or wet weather he wore a large grey plaid shawl round his neck and shoulders. His trousers, which were short, by the aid of low shoes exhibited either white or grey stockings. Perhaps the most noticeable part of his apparel during his later years was an old battered black-banded tall hat, the greasy look of which indicated long service.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1859

  He is to be called “translator” only in default of a better word, one which should express the poetic transfusion of a poetic spirit from one language to another, and the re-presentation of the ideas and images of the original in a form not altogether diverse from their own, but perfectly adapted to the new conditions of time, place, custom, and habit of mind in which they reappear. In the whole range of our literature there is hardly to be found a more admirable example of the most skilful poetic rendering of remote foreign poetry than this work of an anonymous author affords. It has all the merit of a remarkable original production, and its excellence is the highest testimony that could be given, to the essential impressiveness and worth of the Persian poet. It is the work of a poet inspired by the work of a poet; not a copy, but a reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration.

  If Fitzgerald’s accuracy had equalled his ingenuity, he might claim the very first place amongst modern translators.

	None can say
	That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought
	Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
	Than which I know no version done
	In English more divinely well;
	A planet equal to the sun
	Which cast it, that large infidel
	Your Omar; and your Omar drew
	Full-handed plaudits from our best
	In modern letters.

	These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
	Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
	The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
	Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

  The little pamphlet of immortal music called “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.”… FitzGerald’s versions are so free, he is so little bound by the details of his original, he is so indifferent to the timid pedantry of the ordinary writer who empties verse out of the cup of one large language into that of another, that we may attempt with him what would be a futile task with almost every other English translator—we may estimate from his versions alone what manner of poet he was. In attempting to form such an estimate we are bound to recognise that his best-known work is also his best. The “Omar Khayyám” of FitzGerald takes its place in the third period of Victorian poetry, as an original force wholly in sympathy with other forces, of which its author took no personal cognisance. Whether it accurately represents or not the sentiment of a Persian astronomer of the eleventh century is a question which fades into insignificance beside the fact that it stimulated and delighted a generation of young readers, to whom it appealed in the same manner, and along parallel lines with, the poetry of Morris, Swinburne, and the Rossettis. After the lapse of thirty years we are able to perceive that in the series of poetical publications of capital importance which marked the close of the fifties it takes its natural place.

  “Omar Khayyám” is a celebrated work in his version, but it is largely his own work, and it may be hoped that the other translations will become better known, for, without having the commanding qualities of Omar, they are studded with charming stories in verse, and not encumbered with Eastern moods of thought so much as to disturb a Western mind; to us they are more pleasing. The two poetical speeches of the English and Roman generals, with their fine movement, are also a kind of translation—from prose to verse, though nearer to original composition.

  The man whose shy audacity of diffident and daring genius has given Omar Khayyám a place for ever among the greatest of English poets. That the very best of his exquisite poetry, the strongest and serenest wisdom, the sanest and most serious irony, the most piercing and the profoundest radiance of his gentle and sublime philosophy, belong as much or more to Suffolk than to Shiraz, has been, if I mistake not, an open secret for many years—“and,” as Dogberry says, “it will go near to be thought so shortly.” Every quatrain, tho’ it is something so much more than graceful or distinguished or elegant, is also, one may say, the sublimation of elegance, the apotheosis of distinction, the transfiguration of grace.

  As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally and once for all illustrated in that of “Omar Khayyám” that in narrow space it is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and pedantic point of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with perfect freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no other translator has ever reproduced it. Whether his version of the “Rubáiyát,” with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation, and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost anyone else, may be suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistakable and altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.

  Among the works which he published in his lifetime his fame must principally rest on his rendering of the “Rubáiyát.” The great unbelieving astronomer-poet of Persia possesses a special interest for children of the modern world, but did not attract readers at once on the appearance of an English version. According to an account which has been published, the accident of a stray copy falling into the hands of Rossetti, Swinburne, and Burton, first saved it from neglect. If it is fair to argue from the free manner in which he handled the text of “Æschylus,” his version of “Omar” is probably far from literal. The first stanza was entirely his own, and two grand lines at the beginning of the thirty-third were borrowed from Hafiz:

	“Earth could not answer; nor the seas that mourn
	In flowing purple of their Lord forlorn.”

The editor of his remains and his friend Professor Cowell admit that he allowed himself great liberties. But a free rendering may sometimes be more faithful than an accurate one, and FitzGerald was specially qualified to penetrate his poet’s meaning.

  His edition of the “Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám was published anonymously by Bernard Quaritch in 1859, after it had lain neglected for two years in the office of Fraser’s Magazine. It was equally neglected by the public; and the publisher, to whom he made a gift of the work, exposed the pamphlets for sale at a penny each. They were gradually picked up, and the germs of the Omar Khayyám cult were planted. It was almost ten years before a second edition was called for; in this the number of quatrains was increased from seventy-five to one hundred and ten…. In June 1883 he went to visit his old friend Mr. Crabbe at Merton Rectory. In the morning he was found “as if sleeping peacefully, but quite dead.”… Since then, FitzGerald’s fame has been continually growing, and the world recognizes that he added at least one classic to universal literature.

  I can never forget my emotion when I first saw Fitz-Gerald’s translation of the Quatrains. Keats, in his sublime ode on Chapman’s Homer, has described the sensation once for all:—

	“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
	When a new planet swims into his ken.”

The exquisite beauty, the faultless, the singular grace of those amazing stanzas, were not more wonderful than the depth and breadth of their profound philosophy, their knowledge of life, their dauntless courage, their serene facing of the ultimate problems of life and of death. Of course the doubt arose, which has assailed many as ignorant as I was of the literature of the East, whether it was the poet or his translator to whom was due this splendid result. Could it be possible that in the Eleventh Century, so far away as Khorassan, so accomplished a man of letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth, and such insight, such calm disillusion, such cheerful and jocund despair? My doubt lasted only till I came upon a literal translation of the Rubáiyát, and I saw that not the least remarkable quality of Fitz-Gerald’s poem was its fidelity to the original. In short, Omar was an earlier Fitz-Gerald, or Fitz-Gerald was a re-incarnation of Omar.

  Why is it that, from the moment the genius of Fitz-Gerald made him known to all who speak the English language, he had taken rank with the immortals, whom no change of taste or fashion can dethrone? I do not pretend to give a full answer to this question, but there are one or two considerations which are obvious. First, as regards form; apart from the strange fascination of the metre, there is within a narrow compass, in point of actual bulk, a wholeness and completeness in Omar, which belongs only to the highest art…. There is nothing in Omar’s work that could be added or taken away without injuring its perfection. Then as regards substance, where else in literature has the littleness of man, as contrasted with the trifling infinitude of his environment, the direct result of serenity and acquiescence, been more brilliantly or more powerfully enforced?

  He stands as one more example of men who have done good work and have died unrewarded, leaving behind them an ever-widening circle of fame.

  Of Edward FitzGerald’s quatrains, forty-nine are faithful and beautiful paraphrases of single quatrains to be found in the Ouseley or Calcutta MSS., or both. Forty-four are traceable to more than one quatrain, and may therefore be termed the “composite” quatrains. Two are inspired by quatrains found by FitzGerald only in Nicholas’ text. Two are quatrains reflecting the whole spirit of the original poem. Two are traceable exclusively to the influence of the Mantik ut-tair of Ferid ud din Attār. Two quatrains primarily inspired by Omar were influenced by the Odes of Hafiz. And three, which appeared only in the first and second editions and were afterwards suppressed by Edward FitzGerald himself, are not—so far as a careful search enables me to judge—attributable to any lines of the original texts. Other authors may have inspired them, but their identification is not useful in this case.

  If Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the artist-poet and mystic, had not been lounging one day about the book-stalls of Piccadilly, dipping now into the “farthing” and now into the “penny box,” in search of treasure, the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” would doubtless have sunk still deeper under the dusty piles of unsalable old books and waited another decade for a discoverer. It was already wearing on to a decade since the little quarto pamphlet in its brown paper wrappers—“Beggarly disguise as to paper and print, but magnificent vesture of verse”—had been issued from the press of Mr. Bernard Quaritch at the sum of five shillings, and, failing of buyers, had fallen by natural stages to the ignominy of the “penny box.”… Whether or not the pamphlet that Rossetti bore home from Piccadilly was the first that had been rescued from the penny box, it was at least the first that had made a personal appeal to its buyer. All the imagination of the poet, and his circle of dream-sown spirits, was quickened by it, and in that brotherhood of artists and mystics, styled the “Pre-Raphaelites,” the study of the “Rubáiyát” grew into a cult and Omar came at last into hif own.

Letters

  FitzGerald’s letters have the charm of many felicities of description, reminiscence, confession, criticism, rising naturally out of pages which have the rare charm of ease. He touches the keys gently and soothingly, and glides into passages of unlaboured beauty. What, for example, can be more delightful than this record of the pleasant idleness of a day in spring?

  His correspondence now reveals him, unless I am much mistaken, as one of the most pungent, individual, and picturesque of English letter-writers. Rarely do we discover a temperament so mobile under a surface so serene and sedentary; rarely so feminine a sensibility side by side with so virile an intelligence. He is moved by every breath of nature; every change of hue in earth or air affects him; and all these are reflected, as in a camera obscura, in the richly coloured moving mirror of his letters. It will not surprise one reader of this correspondence if the name of its author should grow to be set, in common parlance, beside those of Gray and Cowper for the fidelity and humanity of his addresses to his private friends. Meanwhile, we ought, perhaps, to have remembered what beautiful pages there were in Euphranor, and in particular to have recalled that passage about the University boat-races which Lord Tennyson, no easy critic to satisfy, has pronounced to be one of the most beautiful fragments of English prose extant.

  I also read “Fitzgerald’s Correspondence” with great interest and satisfaction. I quite agree with you that they are among the best we have. I fancy he took enough pains with them to make them as easy as they are. They were his only means of communication with the outward world, of translating himself as it were into the vulgar tongue. He was a scholar and a gentleman—I change the order of the words because I fancy a distinction and a pleasing one. I agree with you as to the general sanity of his literary judgments—though he would not have been so agreeable as he is without a few honest prejudices too. We are so hustled about by fortune that I found solace as I read in thinking that here was a man who insisted on having his life to himself, and largely had it accordingly. A hermit, by the bye, as he was, has a great advantage in forming secure conclusions. Another charm of the book to me was that it so often reminded me of J. H.

  Among the letters too charming to be lost, yet too personal and frankly confiding to be read without some twinges of conscience, are those of Edward FitzGerald, the last man in all England to have coveted such posthumous publicity. They reveal truthfully that kind, shy, proud, indolent, indifferent, and intensely conservative nature; a scholar without the prick of ambition, a critic with no desire to be judicial, an unwearied mind turned aside from healthy and normal currents of activity. Yet the indiscreet publishing of a private opinion, a harmless bit of criticism such as any man has a right to express to a friend, drew down upon this least aggressive of authors abuse too coarse to be quoted. It is easy to say that Browning dishonored himself rather than FitzGerald by the brutality of his language. This is true; but, nevertheless, it is not pleasant to go down to posterity branded with Billingsgate by a great poet; and it is doubly hard to bear such a weight of vituperation because a word said in a letter has been ruthlessly given to the world.

  The premier translator is always admirable, whether in verse or prose, and his good wine needs no bush…. Edward FitzGerald ranks easily with the best half-dozen of our later letter-writers.

  He is still the most independent of critics, who cannot admire Goethe’s “Faust” as a work of construction or imagination, or “doat on George Eliot,” or take any satisfaction in Tennyson’s later productions (least of all, in the “dramas”), or join a Browning Society, or find Irving endurable as an actor. His “famous Lyceum Hamlet … was incomparably the worst I had ever witnessed, from Covent Garden down to a Country Barn…. When he got to ‘Something too much of this,’ I called out from the Pit door where I stood, ‘A good deal too much,’ and not long after returned to my solitary inn.”

  On the whole, of volumes of letters very recently given to the world, those of Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, seem to have most of the genuine epistolary spirit in them, in association with a true feeling for good books, and the things that good books bring into the mind, with an easy view of human nature; with a kindly eye for the ups and downs of human life, and a clear perception that one of the prime secrets is not to expect more from life than life is capable of giving.

  During his lifetime the translator of “Omar Khayyám,” who cared very little for fame, was comparatively unknown beyond a small circle of cultured friends and admirers. But his peculiarly charming letters, published since his death, seem likely to give him a permanent position not so very far removed from that which Horace Walpole or even Charles Lamb enjoy by consent. The mere fact that he did not write for the world, but for his friends, gives his remains a greater charm in an age of babble and advertisement. They are, indeed, a striking instance of, what has been happily termed, “the value of reserve in literature.”

  His correspondence, by which mainly the world knows him, is full of interesting revelations. His whims and foibles, and his own gentle amusement over them; his bookish likes and dislikes, one as hearty as the other; his affection for his friends, whose weak points he could sometimes lay a pretty sharp finger on, notwithstanding, frankness being almost always one of an odd man’s virtues; his delight in the sea and in his garden (“Don’t you love the oleander? I rather worship mine,” he writes to Mrs. Kemble); his pottering over translations from Spanish, the Persian, and the Greek (“all very well; only very little affairs:” he feels “ashamed” when his friend Thompson inquires about them); his music, wherein his taste was simple but difficult (he played without technique and sang without a voice, loving to “recollect some of Fidelio on the pianoforte,” and counting it more enjoyable “to perform in one’s head one of Handel’s choruses” than to hear most Exeter Hall performances),—all these things, and many more, come out in his letters, which are never anything but letters, written to please his friends,—and himself,—with no thought of anything beyond that. In them we see his life passing.

General

  Whatever deductions may have to be made by the student, who feels that in the “Agamemnon” Mr. FitzGerald has done less than a more sustained effort of his singular powers might have produced, it will be acknowledged by all competent judges that his translation separates itself at once from merely meritorious work, and takes a place apart among English versions of Greek poetry. It is almost trivial to say that the diction of a modern author is Shakespearean. The phrase seems to mean much; but, when analysed, it conveys an indistinct impression. Yet Mr. FitzGerald’s style in the finest passages of this great torso has a weight, a compactness and a picturesqueness, to find the proper parallel for which we must look back to Shakespeare’s age. The strong sonorous verse has the richness and the elasticity, of Marlowe’s line; and for the first time, after so many attempts, the English reader catches in his translation a true echo of the pompous Aeschylean manner…. Convinced of the impossibility of presenting the Greek play in its integrity to English readers, and doubtful of his power to succeed where “as good versifiers and better scholars,” had seemed to him to fail, he determined to recast the “Agamemnon” of the Attic poet, adhering in parts to the original, and in parts diverging from it, according to his sense of fitness. The result is that, while the whole poem is profoundly penetrated with the Aeschylean spirit, which it reproduces with wonderful vividness, and while certain portions are accurate transcripts from the original, the Greek student will find many of the most impressive passages suppressed, and some most carefully prepared effects omitted.

  His life, taken altogether, was a gratification of refined tastes and a simple exercise of unpretending virtues among his friends and acquaintances…. Original genius he did not possess, but his appreciativeness of excellence was sound and true; whenever he praises, one is compelled to assent. He spent the most of his energy in endeavouring to render foreign classics into English in such a way as to make them effective to modern taste. He did not write for those who could read the originals. He professed only to make adaptations rather than translations, and he cut and modified with a free hand. Scholars have praised his work for what it strove to accomplish, accepting the limitations which his taste imposed upon it. Taste, however developed and refined, is still not genius, and it must be frankly acknowledged that he has not given us just what Calderon, Æschylus, and Sophocles created. His Persian translations vary even more widely from the originals.

  Judging from the pure wine of poetry which, in the capacity of a translator, he has added to our literature, and from the sanity, the sense of style, the vigor of intellect, and the large imaginative grasp of his thought everywhere apparent in his versions, one may fairly doubt whether his self-supposed inferiority to the Tennysons, and Carlyle and Thackeray was not a matter of ambition rather than of native capacity. At all events, the translator who, by the fine originality and daring creativeness of his renderings of such various poets, has fairly earned a right to the title of prince of translators since old Chapman, may safely be said to have deserved better of his language and of future memory than any secondary poet of his time. It is only when we consider that really great translators are even rarer than poets who can pass awhile for great, that we are capable of doing justice to the modest genius of him who made great Sophocles, mighty Æschylus, sad Omar, and impassioned Calderon, clasp hands across the centuries and speak with living force in English words. He has made these masters speak upon his page, perhaps not just as they would have spoken had they been Englishmen, but with a music and a power scarcely inferior to their own. He has done for them in short, what Chaucer did for Boccaccio, what Coleridge did for Schiller. The quatrains from Omar seem to be little less original with FitzGerald than is the Elegy with Gray, and perhaps the one poem will live as eternally as the other. If this be true, or even half true, then “dear old Fitz,” with his “innocent far niente life,”… has after all left his countrymen a legacy which they will prize when Swinburnes and Morrises and Mrs. Brownings shall be remembered, if at all, like Waller and Marvell and Donne, by a few tuneful lines in old anthologies.

  Who is rashly to decide what place may not finally be awarded to a man capable of such admirable feats in English prose and verse? There can be little doubt that when much contemporary clamour has died out for ever, the clear note of the Nightingale of Woodbridge will still be heard from the alleys of his Persian garden.

  What Fitzgerald might have done with his gifts and his opportunities, his talents, his scholarship, and his competence, if he had devoted his days to literature, we may conjecture, but we cannot know. But he did not devote his days to literature, wherein he had no ambition to excel. He read and read, he thought and thought; but he was averse from writing books, and of the three which he published he prefixed his name to but one. This was his second book, Six Dramas from Calderon (1853); his first one, Euphranor (1851), stealing into the world anonymously, and dying silently—a fate which nearly overtook his last one, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1861), which, also published anonymously, and at his expense, was luckily preserved by one of those miracles which sometimes illuminate the history of literature. Fitzgerald kept a few copies for himself, and gave the rest of the edition to the publisher, who derived no profit from it, since it would not sell, and could scarcely be given away. Still there was something in it that made its way, a force that would be recognized, an imperishable vitality, the vitality of the master, Omar Khayyám, and the scholar, Edward Fitzgerald.