I don't see why we should trouble ourselves about his 'worst.' He had his weaker side like all of us, the foolish part of his nature as well as the wise; but 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum' especially applies in such cases.—I remain, dear sir, yours sincerely,
E. B. Cowell.
There is one short letter from FitzGerald to Borrow in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Letters. It is dated June 1857 and from it we learn that FitzGerald lent Borrow the Calcutta manuscript of Omar Khayyám, upon which he based his own immortal translation, and from a letter to W. H. Thompson in 1861 we learn that Cowell, who had inspired the writing of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám, Donne and Borrow were the only three friends to whom he had sent copies of his 'peccadilloes in verse' as he calls his remarkable translation,[214] and this two years after it was published. A letter, dated July 6, 1857,[215] asks for the return of FitzGerald's copy of the Ouseley manuscript of Omar Khayyám, Borrow having clearly already returned the Calcutta manuscript. This letter concludes on a pathetic note:
My old Parson Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village church sward. Why, our time seems coming. Make way, gentlemen!
Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald's great translation of Omar Khayyám, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the
' ... golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well,'
to quote Tennyson's famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald's dolce far niente paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the manuscript of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. 'Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me,' he wrote to Cowell. 'Borrow is greatly delighted with your MS. of Omar which I showed him,' he says in another letter to Cowell (June 23, 1857), 'delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.'[216]
The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the Rubáiyát:
To George Borrow, Esq.
10 Marine Parade, Lowestoft.