longer. On his return to his native city he made a practice of attending the morning and evening prayers, and of disguising his private opinions, but for all that, they were no secret. In astronomy and in philosophy he was without a rival, and his eminence in those sciences would have passed into a proverb had he only possessed self-control.”

Shahrastáni's view of Omar's character appears to have been the one generally accepted by the literary men of Islam, as Abul Feda, who lived about 200 years later, writes much in the same strain, lamenting his being so much addicted to poetry and pleasure.

In an essay by the celebrated Ghazzáli of Tús, who was, like Shahrastáni, a contemporary of Omar's, there is a passage in which Omar is not improbably referred to as an example of the sceptical habit of mind induced by scientific pursuits.

The following story of Omar in his old age is given in the preface to the Calcutta MS. on the authority of Nizami of Samarkand, one of his disciples:

"I chanced to meet Maulana Omar in a garden, and in course of conversation he said, 'My tomb shall be in a certain place where each breath of the north wind shall shower down roses upon it.' I marvelled at that saying, thinking that he spoke idly. Nishapúr on divers occasions it was outside a garden, and the fruit trees reached out their branches over the wall of the garden, and had dropped their blossoms over his tomb, so that it was hidden beneath them."

After his death I went to and visited his tomb, and

1 See Schmölders, "Essai sur les Ecoles philosophiques ches les Arabes," p. 115. Ghazzáli was born in 450.

II.

The great difficulty in the way of arriving at a satisfactory text of Omar's poems arises from the exceeding variety and discrepancy of the materials. We look in vain for anything approaching to a "Textus Receptus.” What may be called the Lower Bengal family of MSS., represented by the Asiatic Society's MS., the two India Office MSS., and the Calcutta edition, do indeed offer a tolerably uniform text, but their claim to be the best representatives of the genuine text is overthrown by their want of agreement with the Persian and Oude MSS. The Persian MSS. do not even agree with one another, the Bodleian MS., which was written at Shiráz in 865 A.H., being altogether different from the MS. lithographed at Teheran and reprinted by M. Nicolas. The Oude or Upper India MSS., again, to which belong the one lithographed at Lucknow, and probably also the Cambridge MS., include a very large number of quatrains not found elsewhere. The number of quatrains seems to increase in proportion to the modernness of the MS. Thus the old Bodleian MS. contains only 158, and the two Paris MSS. (which are both of the tenth century) only 175 and 213, while the modern Cambridge copy contains no less than 801. The late Mrs. Cadell, who collated all the MSS. of Omar in Europe, told me she had found in one place and another no less than 1200 quatrains attributed to him. She has, however, in an article in Frazer for May 1879, expressed the opinion that the number of genuine quatrains is not more than 250 or

B

300, and I am inclined to think this estimate high enough. But when one comes to consider which particular quatrains are to be pronounced genuine, and which imitations, it is not always easy to form a confident decision. The state of the case is this:-Out of all the quatrains passing under Omar's name, hardly any stand alone. Almost every one belongs to a family, more or less numerous, to the other members of which it bears a strong family likeness. One can say with some confidence that all these replicas, paraphrases, and variations of the same ideas can hardly be the work of one and the same hand; but to distinguish with certainty the handiwork of the master from that of his imitators is a task probably beyond the powers of any foreign critic living 800 years after the poems in question were written.

In this difficulty, the rule I have followed in my Persian edition is to give what seem the best specimens of each class of quatrains, and to exclude the rest. In accordance with this rule, I exclude, in particular, a large number of quatrains in praise of wine, and exhortations to live for the day, which recur in the MSS. with most wearisome frequency.

Another cognate difficulty is this, that many of the quatrains ascribed to Omar are also attributed to other poets. I have marked a few of these in the notes, and, doubtless, careful search would bring many more to light. It might be supposed that the character of the language employed would be sufficient to differentiate the work of Omar at any rate from that of poets writing two or three centuries after his time, but, as observed by

1

Chodzko, the literary Persian of 800 years ago differs singularly little from that now in use. Again, if, as has been supposed, there were anything exceptional in Omar's poetry, it might be possible to identify it by internal evidence; but the fact is that all Persian poetry runs very much in grooves, and Omar's is no exception. The poetry of rebellion and revolt from orthodox opinions, which is supposed to be peculiar to him, may be traced in the works of his predecessor Avicenna, as well as in those of Afzul Káshi, and others of his successors. For these reasons I have not excluded any quatrains on account of their being ascribed to other writers as well as Omar. So long as I find fair MS. authority for such quatrains, I include them in the text, not because I am sure Omar wrote them, but because it is just as likely they were written by him as by the other claimants. Of course a text formed on these principles cannot be a very satisfactory one, but, on the other hand, it is useless for an editor to pretend to greater certainty than the case admits of.

For the authorities on which the text is based, reference must be made to my Persian edition.

III.

Omar is a poet who can hardly be translated satisfactorily otherwise than in verse. Prose does well enough for narrative or didactic poetry, where the main things. to be reproduced are the matter and substance; but it is plainly contra-indicated in the case of poetry like Omar's,

where the matter is little else than "the commonplaces of the lyric ode and the tragic chorus," and where nearly the whole charm consists in the style and the manner, the grace of the expression, and the melody of the versification. A literal prose version of such poetry must needs be unsatisfactory, because it studiously ignores the chief points in which the attractiveness of the original consists, and deliberately renounces all attempts to reproduce them.

In deciding on the form to be taken by a new translation of Omar, the fact of the existence of a previous verse translation of universally acknowledged merit ought not, of course, to be left out of account. The successor of a translator like Mr. Fitzgerald, who ventures to write verse, and especially verse of the metre which he has handled with such success, cannot help feeling at almost every step that he is provoking comparisons very much to his own disadvantage. But I do not think this consideration ought to deter him from using the vehicle which everything else indicates as the proper one.

As regards metre, there is no doubt that the quatrain of ten-syllable lines, which has been tried by Hammer, Bicknell, and others, and has been raised by Mr. Fitzgerald almost to the rank of a recognised English metre, is the best representative of the Rubá'í. It fairly satisfies Conington's canon, viz., that there ought to be some degree of metrical conformity between the measure of the original and that of the translation, for though it does not exactly correspond with the Rubai, it very clearly suggests it. In particular, it copies what is