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 Khayyam’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 (23rd June, 1857), “delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.”

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.

My dear Borrow,—I have come here with three nieces to give them sea air and change. They are all perfectly quiet, sensible, and unpretentious girls; so as, if you will come over here any day or days, we will find you board and bed too, for a week longer at any rate. There is a good room below, which we now only use for meals, but which you and I can be quite at our sole ease in. Won’t you come?

I purpose (and indeed have been some while intentioning) to go over to Yarmouth to look for you. But I write this note in hope it may bring you hither also.

Donne has got his soldier boy home from India—Freddy—I always thought him a very nice fellow indeed. No doubt life is happy enough to all of them just now. Donne has been on a visit to the Highlands—which seems to have pleased him—I have got an MS. of Bahram and his Seven Castles (Persian), which I have not yet cared to look far into. Will you? It is short, fairly transcribed, and of some repute in its own country, I hear. Cowell sent it me from Calcutta; but it almost requires his company to make one devote one’s time to Persian, when, with what remains of one’s old English eyes, one can read the Odyssey and Shakespeare.

With compliments to the ladies, believe me, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.

I didn’t know you were back from your usual summer tour till Mr. Cobb told my sister lately of having seen you.

To George Borrow, Esq.

Bath House, Lowestoft, October 10/59.

Dear Borrow,—This time last year I was here and wrote to ask about you. You were gone to Scotland. Well, where are you now? As I also said last year: “If you be in Yarmouth and have any mind to see me I will go over some day; or here I am if you will come here. And I am quite alone. As it is I would bus it to Yarmouth but I don’t know if you and yours be there at all, nor if there, whereabout. If I don’t hear at all I shall suppose you are not there, on one of your excursions, or not wanting to be rooted out; a condition I too well understand. I was at Gorleston some months ago for some while; just after losing my greatest friend, the Bedfordshire lad who was crushed to death, coming home from hunting, his horse falling on him. He survived indeed two months, and I had been to bid him eternal adieu, so had no appetite for anything but rest—rest—rest. I have just seen his widow off from here. With kind regards to the ladies, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.

In a letter to George Crabbe the third, and the grandson of the poet, in 1862, FitzGerald tells him that he has just been reading Borrow’s Wild Wales, “which I like well because I can hear him talking it. But I don’t know if others will like it.” “No one writes better English than Borrow in general,” he says. But FitzGerald, as a lover of style, is vexed with some of Borrow’s phrases, and instances one: “‘The scenery was beautiful to a degree.’ What degree? When did this vile phrase arise?” The criticism is just, but Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live, was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist. His four great books are immortal, and one of them is Wild Wales.

We have a glimpse of FitzGerald in the following letter in my possession, by the friend who had introduced him to Borrow, William Bodham Donne:

To George Borrow, Esq.

40 Weymouth Street, Portland Place, W.,
November 28/62.

My dear Borrow,—Many thanks for the copy of Wild Wales reserved for and sent to me by Mr. R. Cooke. Before this copy arrived I had obtained one from the London Library and read it through, not exactly stans pede in uno, but certainly almost at a stretch. I could not indeed lay it down, it interested me so much. It is one of the very best records of home travel, if indeed so strange a country as Wales is can properly be called home, I have ever met with.

Immediately on closing the third volume I secured a few pages in Fraser’s Magazine for Wild Wales, for though you do not stand in need of my aid, yet my notice will not do you a mischief, and some of the reviewers of Lavengro were, I recollect, shocking blockheads, misinterpreting the letter and misconceiving the spirit of that work. I have, since we met in Burlington Arcade, been on a visit to FitzGerald. He is in better spirits by far than when I saw him about the same time in last year. He has his pictures and his chattels about him, and has picked up some acquaintance among the merchants and mariners of Woodbridge, who, although far below his level, are yet better company than the two old skippers he was consorting with in 1861. They—his present friends—came in of an evening, and sat and drank and talked, and I enjoyed their talk very much, since they discussed of what they understood, which is more than I can say generally of the fine folks I occasionally (very occasionally now) meet in London. I should have said more about your book, only I wish to keep it for print: and you don’t need to be told by me that it is very good.—With best regards to Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke, I am, yours ever truly,

W. B. Donne.

The last letter from FitzGerald to Borrow is dated many years after the correspondence I have here printed. From it we gather that there had been no correspondence in the interval. FitzGerald writes from Little Grange, Woodbridge, in January, 1875, to say that he had received a message from Borrow that he would be glad to see him at Oulton. “I think the more of it,” says FitzGerald, “because I imagine, from what I have heard, that you have slunk away from human company as much as I have.” He hints that they might not like one another so well after a fifteen years’ separation. He declares with infinite pathos that he has now severed himself from all old ties, has refused the invitations of old college friends and old school-fellows. To him there was no companionship possible for his declining days other than his reflections and verses. It is a fine letter, filled with that graciousness of spirit that was ever a trait in FitzGerald’s noble nature. The two men never met again. Borrow died in 1881, FitzGerald two years later.

CHAPTER XXXI
“Wild Wales”

The year 1854 was an adventurous one in Borrow’s life, for he, so essentially a Celt, had in that year two interesting experiences of the “Celtic Fringe.” He spent the first months of the year in Cornwall, as we have seen, and from July to November he was in Wales. That tour he recorded in pencilled note-books, four of which are in the Knapp Collection in New York, and are duly referred to in Dr. Knapp’s biography, and two of which are in my possession. In addition to this I have the complete manuscript of Wild Wales in Borrow’s handwriting, and many variants of it in countless, carefully written pages. Therein lie the possibilities of a singularly interesting edition of Wild Wales should opportunity offer for its publication. When I examine the manuscript, with its demonstration of careful preparation, I do not wonder that it took Borrow eight years—from 1854 to 1862—to prepare this book for the press. Assuredly we recognise here, as in all his books, that he realised Carlyle’s definition of genius—“the transcendent capacity of taking trouble—first of all.”