all his life to the dull and dirty Suffolk country in which he was born, just as, at the end of his life, he returned every year, with the return of spring, to his dearly loved Madame de Sévigné. The altars of our great modern idols, bustle and publicity, received no sacrifices from him. Perfectly regardless of time and money and fashion, he stalked his native roads in a strange costume,-in which, however, it is said, he never ceased to have an indefinable look of the hidalgo about him,or pottered in his boat on the sluggish Deben, asking children odd questions, or looking over Crabbe or Calderon. He had a just horror of clever people, and much preferred the stupidity of country folks to the 'impudence of Londoners.' His time was largely passed with his social inferiors, with the boys who read to him when his eyes began to fail, and who must have been bewildered by his strange sayings and doings; with the bookseller for whose sake he bought books he did not want; or with the 'hero' fisherman of Lowestoft who, 'great man' as he was, had a weakness which he could not conquer, and proved, as far as money went, one of FitzGerald's bad speculations. Not that that would have troubled FitzGerald: his generosity was like everything else about him, of the old-fashioned sort, which, though probably not the wisest, is at least the prettiest; free and open, careless of distant results, and very direct and personal in its application. We imagine it to be very possible that he never gave a guinea to a charitable society in his life, but very certain that he gave a great many to unfortunate individuals with whom he came into contact.

Altogether it was a strange existence, with something about it that may well make us pause in our fussy self-importance. Carlyle saw in it only a peaceable, affectionate, ultra-modest man, ‘and an innocent far niente life'; but, after all, for a man to have made himself peaceable, affectionate, and ultra-modest,' is to have done something, and something which to his neighbours is of far more value than many more shining performances. Perhaps, too, we are apt nowadays to undervalue the higher sort of innocency, and to forget that there is old authority for the doctrine that it is just innocence which brings a man peace at the last,' and that another authority, still higher if not quite so old, makes pure religion' itself consist in two things, one of which is keeping unspotted from the world.' Besides, from a humbler point of view, or indeed from any point of view whatever, manliness and cheerfulness, generosity and gentleness and pure unadulterated simplicity, must always be things worth having. Even if the world's coarse thumb' asks as usual for results more material and tangible, the attainment of such

graces

graces will always redeem a life like FitzGerald's from the charge of having been wasted and useless. Any such charge is, however, absurd enough, apart from these considerations; for the translator of 'Omar Khayyam' is assuredly not without his proper reason for existing.'

6

A life like FitzGerald's has no story. He was born at Bredfield, near Woodbridge, in 1809. The chief recollection he seems to have retained of his childhood was the rather terrible if very splendid figure of his mother, a great lady who used to astonish the neighbourhood with her coach and four, and who seems to have had a great lady's temper. He went to school at Bury St. Edmund's, where he began his long friendships with William Donne, who was after Censor of Plays, and with Spedding, the editor of Bacon.' It was at Cambridge that he made the acquaintance of Thackeray, who spoke affectionately of him on his deathbed, and of Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity, FitzGerald's college. He followed no profession after taking his degree. Till 1853, though he often shifted his quarters, he lived mainly in a thatched cottage at Boulge, near Woodbridge, just outside the gate of his brother's place, Boulge Hall. He was in lodgings in Woodbridge from 1860 to 1874, when he settled in a small house of his own outside the town, named, by command of some lady who visited him, Little Grange. And Laird of Little Grange,' as he liked to sign himself, he remained till he died, quite suddenly, in June 1883. He is buried in Boulge churchyard; and a rose, the daughter of one that grows on Omar Khayyam's tomb, has been planted over his grave. The text on the stone, 'It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves,' was his choice.

The little he wrote was all published anonymously, except 'Six Dramas of Calderon' in 1853. He prefixed a memoir to an edition of the poems of his friend Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet of Woodbridge, in 1849. Two years later, he printed the remarkable dialogue 'Euphranor.' 'Polonius' appeared in 1852; a rendering of the Agamemnon,' parts of which are unequalled, was published in 1876; and four editions of his translation of Omar Khayyam' came out before his death, the first appearing in 1859, without gaining any immediate recognition. The other Persian translations were left in manuscript and only appeared in Mr. Aldis Wright's edition of his Literary Remains, 1889. He was a man of many and notable friendships, chiefly kept up by interchange of letters. Those friendships that date from Bury and Cambridge have been given; others that followed, to be extinguished only by death, united him to Alfred Tennyson and Frederic Tennyson,

Carlyle,

Carlyle, and Carlyle's friend and editor, Norton; Barton, the poet, and Lawrence, the painter; to Sir Frederick Pollock, Lowell, two Crabbes, son and grandson of his favourite poet; to Archbishop Trench, Professor Cowell, who led him to read Persian, and Mr. Aldis Wright, whom he appointed his literary

executor.

It used to be said that a man is known by his friends. If that be so, the world which knows his friends so well has no need of an introduction to FitzGerald. The companion of men like these was certainly no ordinary man, either in heart or head. Nor would it be possible to keep on writing dull letters to such men for forty years. FitzGerald's letters then, we know beforehand, are not dull. In fact they are among the best in the language, and it is likely enough that they will find more readers than Omar Khayyam'; though no doubt, but for 'Omar Khayyam,' we should never have heard of them. Letters show the man, and we have FitzGerald here set out before us, just as he was, in all his kindliness and humour, in all his fine and acute perception of true and false in art and literature, in his love of all that is truly lovable, in his queer ways and whims, even in his weaknesses. A man with his tastes could not write to such men as those to whom his letters went, without, often talking of things, books and pictures and music, for instance, that are not likely to be soon forgotten; and of things, too, whose interest is everlasting, the spring and the birds and the sea. On such subjects as these, his letters are full of good sayings, sayings with the personal mark upon them, fresh and worth the utterance, if often in substance very old. Indeed, there is something one would like to quote on almost every page; and it would not be hard to make a large volume of extracts from them, on the Book of Beauties principle, which, detestable as it assuredly would be as a book, would yet contain nothing unworthy of insertion.

Hundreds of new books appear every week, and it is for the reviewer to warn the public against those which are not worth reading, and to introduce to the public those which are. But he has a third duty, certainly not less important, to do with regard to old books, one which has been the special delight of all the great critics. He has to call the public back, from time to time, to old friends whom it might otherwise forget. The first duty or the second has been often only a pleasant excuse for the third. Sainte-Beuve will write on a new edition of Molière or La Fontaine, and Matthew Arnold will review a new translation of Marcus Aurelius, not because they want to praise or blame the new edition, but because they want, and

want

want very much, to fetch down Molière and Marcus Aurelius from that upper shelf on which forgetful or ungrateful people are too apt to leave them. So, in this case of Edward FitzGerald, we have a little of two duties to do. Nothing assuredly of the first we spoke of, the business of warning; but something of the second, for there is a new volume of FitzGerald's Letters, those to Fanny Kemble, just reprinted from Temple Bar'; and, as the third duty, there are the old letters and the old friends, whom the public has known, or ought to have known long ago, to recall to all our memories again.

There are a dozen ways in which this might be done. However, in FitzGerald's case, it is not what he did or wrote that we want so much to remember, but what he was. It is as

a personality even more than as a poet that we think of him. When we are calling an old friend to mind, the best way of bringing him before us again as he was, is to think of the things he cared most about. So there will be no better way of getting at the living picture of FitzGerald than by hearing him talk of some of the things that gave him most pleasure.

And first, of music. There was nothing he cared for more. His taste in it was, like all his tastes, a little oldfashioned, for he preferred melody to harmony and Italian music to German. He was himself always fond of singing, from the Cambridge days when Thackeray and he sang together, to those later on when he would trudge through the mud' of an evening to Bredfield Vicarage and go through one of Handel's Coronation Anthems with Crabbe, his poet's

son.

'With not a voice among us,' as he says; laughable it may seem, yet it is not quite so; the things are so well-defined, simple, and grand, that the faintest outline of them tells; my admiration of the old Giant grows and grows; his is the Music for a Great, Active, People. . . .

"Sometimes too, I go over to a place elegantly called Bungay, where a Printer lives who drills the young folks of a manufactory there to sing in Chorus once a week. They sing some of the English Madrigals, some of Purcell, and some of Handel, in a way to satisfy me, who believe that the grandest things do not depend on delicate finish. If you were here now, we would go over and hear the" Harmonious Blacksmith" sung in Chorus, with words, of course. It almost made me cry when I heard the divine Air rolled into vocal harmony from the four corners of a large Hall.'

That was the music he loved, and could keep up in the country, the old English music and Handel; but he did not stop there. Indeed he preferred Mozart to Handel, who, he

says,

says, 'never gets out of his wig.' He admired Beethoven: The finale of C minor is very noble,' but Beethoven is gloomy'; and, as he said of poetry, FitzGerald admitted nothing into his Paradise but such as breathe content and virtue.' He detested Wagner, and in Bizet's 'Carmen' he saw nothing but very beautiful accompaniments to no melody,' which, after all, is more than many quite sane people saw in it at first. He thought indeed that in French music as in all French things' there was an absence of the 'Holy of Holies far withdrawn.' Beethoven, on the other hand, he quite felt was 'original, majestic, and profound,' with 'a depth not to be reached all at once.' But perhaps he was,

...

6

'strictly speaking, more of a thinker than a musician. A great genius he was somehow. . . . He tried to think in music; almost to reason in music; whereas, perhaps, we should be contented with feeling in it. It can never speak very definitely. There is that famous "Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty," &c. in Handel; nothing can sound more simple and devotional; but it is only lately adapted to these words, being originally (I believe) a love-song in "Rodelinda." Then the famous music of "He layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters," &c. was originally fitted to an Italian pastoral song"Nasce al bosco in rozza cuna, un felice pastorello, &c." That part which seems so well to describe "and walketh on the wings of the wind" falls happily in with "e con l'aura di fortuna with which this pastorello sailed along. The character of the music is ease and largeness; as the shepherd lived, so God Almighty walked on the wind. . . . Music is so far the most universal language, that any one piece in a particular strain symbolizes all the analogous phenomena, spiritual or material—if you can talk of spiritual phenomena.'

Therefore it can never speak very definitely'; and, in part at least for that reason, Mozart is 'incontestably the purest Musician; Beethoven would have been Poet or Painter as well.' He believed as much in Mozart's power as in his beauty.

'People cannot believe that Mozart is powerful, because he is so Beautiful; in the same way as it requires a very practised eye (more than I possess) to recognize the consummate power predominating in the tranquil Beauty of Greek sculpture.'

Perhaps this is not all true, and certainly it is not all new; but everyone will admit that FitzGerald's firmness and terseness are qualities not invariably found in musical criticism.

But music, after all, gives us only a side-light on FitzGerald's character. It is what he says about books that must supply the central light of the picture. He may be said to