But Mr. Fitzgerald protests that while Omar was not a Mystic, but only a Bacchanalian Poet, and 'that while the Wine Omar celebrates is simply the Juice of the Grape, he bragged more than he drank of it.' But this surely is to make him worse morally than the poor will-broken, self-abandoned drunkard! Yet after all, the excuse of 'the moderate drinker' is never quite to be trusted, as Mr. Fitzgerald himself in this case only too fully proves. The 'Tavern' too is a literal Tavern, and his very first presentation of his Hero introduces him to us crying for fresh air at cock-crow, after the night's carouse, and his kindred thirsty votaries shouting from the outside to get in:
'And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted—"Open then the Door!"'
We soon find that he has only one fixed Article in his Creed—the certainty of Annihilation:
'One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.'
The only thing here certain however, is that this, according to all Persian Prosody, is a bad, illegitimate Quatrain, and Omar himself would never have rhymed it thus! And notwithstanding these 'brave words,' it seems almost certain that the poor soul of the 'Astronomer Poet' did not entirely die out with his last unsavoury breath; for is there not the strongest internal evidence—and pray, mark it well, in these days of the Higher Criticism—that it was Omar Redivivus, in an ill-starred, yet most sincere and loveable Rustic Bard of our own, who sang gloriously at the same psychological moment, with his own boon-companions, after seven centuries of world-wide drinking, again:
'It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That's blinkin' in the lift sae hie;