Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian, and after some exercises elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase, or whatever it is to be called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam appeared in 1859, to be much altered in subsequent editions. FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three pretty stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he was first of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) have been added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to _Euphranor_, a dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, and other things) he interests us doubly as a character and as a critic, for the letters contain much criticism. Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather few and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to make new friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate towards the old, with a very strong distaste for crowds and general society, and undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a _maniaque_, that is to say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer. These characteristics, which make him interesting as a man, are still more interestingly reflected in his criticism, which is often one-sided and unjust, sometimes crotchety (as when he would not admit that even his beloved Alfred Tennyson had ever been at his best since the collection of 1842), but often also wonderfully delicate and true. As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally and once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyam that in narrow space it is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and pedantic point of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with perfect freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no other translator has ever reproduced it. Whether his version of the Rubaiyat, with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation, and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistakable and altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.