“That Mrs. Fitzgerald is among the most vivid memories of my girlish days. She and her husband were kind and intimate friends of my father and mother. He was a most amiable and genial Irish gentleman, with considerable property in Ireland and Suffolk, and a fine house in Portland Place, and had married his cousin, a very handsome, clever, and eccentric woman. I remember she always wore a bracelet of his hair, on the massive clasp of which were engraved the words, ‘Stesso sangue, stessa sorte.’ I also remember, as a feature of sundry dinners at their house, the first gold dessert and table ornaments that I ever saw, the magnificence of which made a great impression upon me; though I also remember their being replaced, upon Mrs. Fitzgerald’s wearying of them, by a set of ground glass and dead and burnished silver, so exquisite that the splendid gold service was pronounced infinitely less tasteful and beautiful. One member of her family—her son Edward Fitzgerald—has remained my friend till this day. His parents and mine are dead. Of his brothers and sisters I retain no knowledge, but with him I still keep up an affectionate and to me most valuable and interesting correspondence. He was distinguished from the rest of his family, and indeed from most people, by the possession of very rare intellectual and artistic gifts. A poet, a painter, a musician, an admirable scholar and writer, if he had not shunned notoriety as sedulously as most people seek it, he would have achieved a foremost place among the eminent men of his day, and left a name second to that of very few of his contemporaries. His life was spent in literary leisure, or literary labours of love of singular excellence, which he never cared to publish beyond the circle of his intimate friends: Euphranor, Polonius, collections of dialogues full of keen wisdom, fine observation, and profound thought; sterling philosophy written in the purest, simplest, and raciest English; noble translations, or rather free adaptations of Calderon’s two finest dramas, The Wonderful Magician and Life’s a Dream, and a splendid paraphrase of the Agamemnon of Æschylus, which fills its reader with regret that he should not have Englished the whole of the great trilogy with the same severe sublimity. In America this gentleman is better known by his translation or adaptation (how much more of it is his own than the author’s I should like to know if I were Irish) of Omar Khayyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia. Archbishop Trench, in his volume on the life and genius of Calderon, frequently refers to Mr. Fitzgerald’s translations, and himself gives a version of Life’s a Dream, the excellence of which falls short, however, of his friend’s finer dramatic poem bearing the same name, though he has gallantly attacked the difficulty of rendering the Spanish in English verse. While these were Edward Fitzgerald’s studies and pursuits, he led a curious life of almost entire estrangement from society, preferring the companionship of the rough sailors and fishermen of the Suffolk coast to that of lettered folk. He lived with them in the most friendly intimacy, helping them in their sea ventures, and cruising about with one, an especially fine sample of his sort, in a small fishing-smack which Edward Fitzgerald’s bounty had set afloat, and in which the translator of Calderon and Æschylus passed his time, better pleased with the fellowship and intercourse of the captain and crew of his small fishing craft than with that of more educated and sophisticated humanity. He and his brothers were school-fellows of my eldest brother under Dr. Malkin, the master of the grammar school of Bury St. Edmunds.”
[94] Mrs. Kemble’s letter was written with a typewriter (see ‘Further Records,’ i. 198, 240, 247). It was given by FitzGerald to Mr. F. Spalding, now of the Colchester Museum, through whose kindness I am enabled to quote it:—
‘York Farm, Branchtown.
‘Tuesday, Dec. 14. 1875.
‘My dear Edward FitzGerald,
‘I have got a printing-machine and am going to try and write to you upon it and see if it will suit your eyes better than my scrawl of handwriting. Thank you for the Photographs and the line of music; I know that old bit of tune, it seems to me. I think Mr. Irving’s face more like Young’s than my Father’s. Tom Taylor, years ago, told me that Miss Ellen Terry would be a consummate comic actress. Portia should never be without some one to set her before the Public. She is my model woman.’
[97a] See ‘Letters,’ ii. 192
[97b] See the Athenæum for Jan. 1, 15, 22, 29, 1876.
[100] In her ‘Further Records,’ i. 250, Mrs. Kemble wrote, March 11th, 1876:—
‘Last week my old friend Edward Fitzgerald (Omar Kyam, you know), sent me a beautiful miniature of my mother, which his mother—her intimate friend—had kept till her death, and which had been painted for Mrs. Fitzgerald. It is a full-length figure, very beautifully painted, and very like my mother. Almost immediately after receiving this from England, my friend Mr. Horace Furness came out to see me. He is a great collector of books and prints, and brought me an old engraving of my mother in the character of Urania, which a great many years ago I remember to have seen, and which was undoubtedly the original of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s miniature. I thought the concidence of their both reaching me at the same time curious.’
[105] On July 22nd, 1880, he wrote to me:—“I am still reading her! And could make a pretty Introduction to her; but Press-work is hard to me now, and nobody would care for what I should do, when done. Mrs. Edwards has found me a good Photo of ‘nos pauvres Rochers,’ a straggling old Château, with (I suppose) the Chapel which her old ‘Bien Bon’ Uncle built in 1671—while she was talking to her Gardener Pilois and reading Montaigne, Molière, Pascal, or Cleopatra, among the trees she had planted. Bless her! I should like to have made Lamb like her, in spite of his anti-gallican Obstinacy.”