depicted: A LITERARY GENT, A Study in Vanity and Dipsomania! Who cares now for his senile scepticism, his pessimistic whine, his withered cynicism, his agnostic blindness and despair, his insolent misanthropy, his impotent blasphemies? We know it all too well; it is only the work of shattered nerves, a muddled brain, and irreligious self-dissipation. See how the Astronomer Poet staggers along to his watch-tower, with that tell-tale nose and flushed brow! How his trembling hands fumble as he vainly tries to focus the stars! How his bleared eyes can find neither Zenith nor Azimuth, Algol nor Aldeboran, nor the Pointers, nor the Pole Star; and how impudently he swears in his blindness, that he too has swept through the Heavens and found _no God_! that man is but a 'Pot _of Clay_,' without freedom and without hope! and that all the World is bitter and hollow and bad! _Great Thinker_, forsooth! Well and truly does he himself say that he was 'never _deep_ in anything but—_Wine_'! 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: