The influence of the Ouseley MS. upon the poem forms the subject of the volume to which I have referred, and, save in so far as it recurs in the parallels which give excuse for the present work, may be dismissed, but the doubts which have sprung up as to the extent to which Edward FitzGerald took, as his editor, Mr. Aldis Wright, says, «great liberties with the original,» have arisen in consequence of the vicissitudes which have befallen the rest of the material from which the poet worked during the construction of his first edition. We know that Prof. Cowell made a copy of the Ouseley MS. for Edward FitzGerald just before he went to India in August, 1856. In another letter he says «I got a copy made for him from the one MS. in the Bengal Asiatic Society's Library at Calcutta soon after I arrived in November, 1856. It reached FitzGerald June 14th, 1857, as I learn by a note in his writing. Some time after this I sent him a copy of that rare Calcutta printed edition which I got from my Munshi.» To possess oneself therefore of full information as to what material Edward FitzGerald really worked from in making the original edition of his poem, it was necessary to consult, line by line, and word by word, the Calcutta MS. (noted as No. 1548 in the Bengal Asiatic Society's Library) and the Calcutta _printed_ edition of 1836,--in addition, of course, to the Ouseley MS. Prof. Cowell most generously placed at my disposal his copy of the Calcutta MS., but, as he himself has recorded, the copy was made by an inferior scribe in a hand which is exceedingly difficult to read. I therefore communicated with Mr. A.T. Pringle, Director of Indian Records in the Home Department at Calcutta, himself a keen and critical student of Omar Khayyam, with a view to getting either a photographic reproduction, or a clean copy of this MS. made for me. Careful search and widely spread enquiry brought to light the fact that the MS. was lost, stolen, or strayed, so that Prof. Cowell's copy was the only record left of this portion of Edward FitzGerald's material. This copy I sent out to India, and had copied by a good writer, a copy being made at the same time to replace that which had been stolen.