Our countrymen have lately learned to admire, in its Western transformation, the extremely clever _Rubáiyát_ of Omer Khayyám. And they are certainly much in the right in so doing. The sterling merits of the Persian original are preserved with striking fidelity in the English version of the poem, which, for the rest, has gone far to prove that the acceptableness among us of Oriental poetry may depend very largely on the skill with which it is transplanted into our language. The translator of the _Rubáiyát_ is Mr. Edward FitzGerald, of Woodbridge in Suffolk. Mr. FitzGerald's ancient family one may learn all about from Burke's _Landed Gentry_, and that he was born in 1809, and that he married Lucy, daughter of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where among his contemporaries and friends were the present poet-laureate and Mr. Spedding, the editor of Bacon. The _London Catalogue_ names three works as by Mr. FitzGerald. These, as we find from inspection of the works themselves, are as follows: 1. _Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth,_ 1851 (it reached a second edition, increased by an _Appendix_, in 1855); 2. _Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances_, 1852; 3. _Six Dramas of Calderon_, 1853. These dramas are translations, in prose and verse, of _The Painter of his Own Dishonor, Keep your Own Secret, Gil Perez the Gallician, Three Judgments at a Blow, The Mayor of Zalamea_, and _Beware of Smooth Water_. In none of these volumes, however, except the last is there any indication of its authorship but there Mr. FitzGerald's name is given in full. The date of his metrical translation of _Salámán and Absál_, from the Persian, we are not at this moment, able to specify. Add, as printed by him, but not published, two other small volumes of translations--one, of the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus; and the other, of two of Calderon's plays, _Life is a Dream_ and _The Wonderful Magician_. Finally, we have to mention an unprinted verse-translation, _The Bird Parliament_, from the Persian _Mantiq-ut-tair_ by Attár. Mr. Allibone knows nothing of Mr. FitzGerald, and he is similarly passed over in silence by the compiler of _Men of the Time._ Everything that he has produced is uniformly distinguished by marked ability; and, such being the case, his indifference to fame, in this age of ambition for literary celebrity, is a phenomenon which deserves to be emphasized. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. By Walter Besant, M.A. Boston: Roberts Brothers.