No doubt many of these Quatrains seem unaccountable unless mystically interpreted; but many more as unaccountable unless literally. Were the Wine spiritual, for instance, how wash the Body with it when dead? Why make cups of the dead clay to be filled with--«_La Divinité_»--by some succeeding Mystic? M. Nicolas himself is puzzled by some «_bizarres_» and «_trop Orientales_» allusions and images--«_d'une sensualité quelquefois révoltante_» indeed--which «_les convenances_» do not permit him to translate; but still which the reader cannot but refer to «_La Divinité_».[12] No doubt also many of the Quatrains in the Teheran, as in the Calcutta, Copies, are spurious; such _Rubaiyat_ being the common form of epigram in Persia. But this, at best, tells as much one way as another; nay, the Sufi, who may be considered the scholar and man of letters in Persia, would be far more likely than the careless epicure to interpolate what favours his own view of the poet. I observe that very few of the more mystical Quatrains are in the Bodleian MS. which must be one of the oldest, as dated at Shiraz, A.H. 865, A.D. 1460. And this, I think, especially distinguishes Omar (I cannot help calling him by his--no, not Christian--familar name) from all other Persian poets: That, whereas with them the poet is lost in his song, the man in allegory and abstraction, we seem to have the man--the _bonhomme_--Omar himself, with all his humours and passions, as frankly before us as if we were really at table with him, after the wine had gone round.