The old life to which he returned was monotonous, recluse, unconventional. He spent most of his days in East Anglia, an unromantic region, yet not unbeautiful or wanting a charm of its own; in summer emerging into the sunshine, sitting on a chair in his garden as Tennyson's poem paints him, or on another chair on the deck of his boat, coasting the shores, or sailing up and down the creeks and estuaries with which that country abounds; in winter crouching over the fire, and in either chair smoking and endlessly reading. In the earlier part of his life he moved about from one home to another, though never very far. In 1860 he settled down at Woodbridge in Suffolk, a pleasant, old-fashioned, provincial town, a sort of East Anglian Totnes, where the Deben, like the more famous Dart, seems to issue from a doorway of close-guarding hills to meet the salt tide, and begins the last stage of its cheerful journey to the open sea. Just before this, in January of 1859, FitzGerald printed a small edition of a translation of a poem by a Persian astronomer, who died about 1123 A.D. The whole production of this famous piece seemed almost an accident. FitzGerald had been introduced, some half-dozen years earlier, to the study of Persian by his friend Mr. E. B. Cowell, a brother East Anglian, then in business in Ipswich. Cowell, wishing to pursue his studies further and take a Degree, went in 1851 as a married and somewhat mature student to Oxford, and there, in the Bodleian Library, came on a rare MS. of the "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám." It is a beautiful little volume, written upon parchment sprinkled with gold dust, in a fine black ink, with blue headings, gold divisions, and delicate Oriental illuminations in blue, gold, and green, at the beginning and the end, and is the earliest known MS. of the poem, dating from 1450 A.D. Of this he made a copy for FitzGerald, who kept it by him, and gradually produced a translation, if not rather a paraphrase. "I also amuse myself," he wrote in December 1853, "with poking out some Persian which E. Cowell would inaugurate me with. I go on with it because it is a point in common with him and enables me to study a little together." In 1858 he had got his version into a shape somewhat to his mind, and sent it to _Fraser's Magazine_. It was kept for about a year, when FitzGerald asked for it back, and had 250 copies printed early in 1859. He gave away a few and sent the rest to Quaritch. What ensued is one of the curiosities of literature. FitzGerald did not expect any success or vogue for the work. True, he had toiled at it. "Very few People," he said, "have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have; though certainly not to be literal." And when he had finished he liked "to make an end of the matter by print." But that was all. "I hardly know," he added, "why I print any of these things which nobody buys."