conversation, and the occupation which those others have ready-made, in
society, business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent
letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have been extremely busy,
and "family men" of the most unblemished character, merely shows that
the rule is not universal. But it may be observed that their letters
usually have less intense idiosyncrasy than those of the others.

Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work, few men have
had more than the author of _Euphranor_ and (as we have had to say
before) the "translator or paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of
Spanish and Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in
this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his genius most
strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly[38] disputed question how
much is Omar and how much FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly
be extended by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon in his
versions of those masters: but it does not concern us here. What does
concern us is the fact that he has contrived to make his most famous
exercise in translation signally, and the others to some extent, not
dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the
spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both
being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong
nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great
translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his
scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in
his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English
Universities in connection with that of English literature knows, even
if he has not been fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable
fashion in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford and
Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost magical influence
over a generation (hardly more) of undergraduates. There was
unmistakably such an _aura_ or atmosphere about in Trinity College,
Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties
of the nineteenth century--a spirit of literature and humour, of
seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry--which
produced things as diverse as _The Dying Swan_ and Clarke's _Library of
Useless Knowledge_, _Vanity Fair_ and the English _Rubaiyat_.

Of this curiously blended mood-combin