[1] See "English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674," by Professor Wilbur C. Abbott, "American Historical Review," April, July, 1909.
[2] The Simpsons produced ministers in every generation from 1560 to 1730, when one of them fell into heresy.
[3] Vol. IV, p. 134, "To Whittier".
[4] Professor W. P. Trent.
[CHAPTER XXXV.]
LATE VICTORIAN POETS.
Edward FitzGerald.
Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge, of Thackeray and Tennyson, was in later life the friend of both. Though he vehemently admired Tennyson's poems up to 1842, he never was quite contented with them later; yet detested all the work of both of the Brownings, as if jealous of the supremacy of his friend. He was, indeed, a humorous person, and a person "of humours," in Ben Jonson's sense of the word. He was a great reader, a delicate and sound critic, where prejudice did not interfere; a most interesting letter-writer; and, for the rest, passed away his life with his books, his garden, his boat, and his pipe. Nothing of the little that he wrote, for example, translations from Æschylus and Calderon, reached the public, nor for long did his very free version of quatrains in the Persian, attributed to Omar Khayyám, an astronomer. It is impossible here to discuss how many of these quatrains are really, by Omar, how many are masterless verses assigned to him by tradition, and how much of the merit of the "Rubáiyàt" is due to FitzGerald. But it is hardly too bold to say that but for the new music and melancholy of FitzGerald's verse, but for FitzGerald's own contribution of a sad and humorous stoicism under an Epicurean wash of colour, Omar and his company would never have been known to the general English reader. The slim pamphlet of the "Rubáiyàt" (1859) was "a drug in the market" till the set of Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it and talked about it. Then a wider circle of young University men made it an idol; to adore it was a sign of grace; and, in the long run, to admire Omar and the old French tale of "Aucassin et Nicolete" became a substitute for a liberal education. It was no longer necessary to have read anything else. It was not FitzGerald's fault that the saying of the Alexandrian Philistine in Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all," became "Omar is enough for all". But, though idolised by the worst judges, FitzGerald's little masterpiece remains a very original and, in Wordsworth's phrase, "a very pretty piece of paganism". His letters are probably the best and most interesting of any letters much concerned with literature that have been published since those of Byron.