all, on the side of brevity, has at any rate the advantage of obliging the translator to eschew modern diffuseness, and of making him try to copy the «classical parsimony,» the archaic terseness and condensation of the original. The poet Cowper has a remark on translation from Latin which is eminently true also of translation from Persian. He says, «That is epigrammatic and witty in Latin which would be perfectly insipid in English.... If a Latin poem is neat, elegant, and musical, it is enough, but English readers are not so easily satisfied.» Much of Omar's matter, when literally translated, seems very trite and commonplace, many of the «conceits,» of which he is so fond, very frigid, and even his peculiar grotesque humour often loses its savour in an English _replica_. The translator is often tempted to elevate a too grovelling sentiment, to «sharpen a point» here and there, to trick out a commonplace with some borrowed modern embellishment. But this temptation is one to be resisted as far as possible. According to the _Hadis_, «The business of a messenger is simply to deliver his message,» and he must not shrink from displaying the naked truth. A translator who writes in verse must of course claim the liberty of altering the form of the expression over and over again, but the substituted expressions ought to be in keeping with the author's style, and on the same plane of sentiment as his. It is beyond the province of a translator to attempt the task of «painting the lily.» But it is easier to lay down correct principles of translation than to observe them unswervingly in one's practice. As regards subject matter, Omar's quatrains may be classed under the following six heads:-- I. _Shikayat i rozgar_--Complaints of «the wheel of heaven,» or fate, of the world's injustice, of the loss of friends, of man's limited faculties and destinies. II. _Hajw_--Satires on the hypocrisy of the «unco' guid,» the impiety of the pious, the ignorance of the learned, and the untowardness of his own generation. III. _Firakiya_ and _Wisaliya_--Love-poems on the sorrows of separation and the joys of reunion with the Beloved, earthly or spiritual. IV. _Bahariya_--Poems in praise of spring, gardens, and flowers. V. _Kufriya_--Irreligious and antinomian utterances, charging the sins of the creature to the account of the Creator, scoffing at the Prophet's Paradise and Hell, singing the praises of wine and pleasure--preaching _ad nauseam_, «eat and drink (especially drink), for to-morrow ye die.» VI. _Munajat_--Addresses to the Deity, now in the ordinary language of devotion, bewailing sins and imploring pardon, now in Mystic phraseology, craving deliverance from «self,» and union with the «Truth» (_Al Hakk_), or Deity, as conceived by the Mystics.