e that more than one
literary historian has claimed Cowper as a Norfolk man. Cowper was born
in Hertfordshire; he lived for a very great deal of his life in Olney, in
Buckinghamshire, in London and in Huntingdon, but if ever there was a man
who took on the texture of East Anglian scenery and East Anglian life it
was Cowper. That beautiful river, the Ouse, which empties itself into
the Wash, was a peculiar inspiration to Cowper, and those who know the
scenery of Olney know that it has conditions exactly analogous in every
way to those of East Anglia. One of Cowper's most beautiful poems is
entitled "On Receipt of my Mother's Portrait out of Norfolk," and he
himself, as I have said, found his last resting-place on East Anglian
soil--at East Dereham.

If there may be some doubt about Cowper, there can be none whatever about
Edward FitzGerald, the greatest letter-writer of recent times. In
mentioning the name of FitzGerald I am a little diffident. It is like
introducing "King Charles's head" into this gathering; for was he not the
author of the poem known to all of us as the _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_,
and there is no small tendency to smile to-day whenever the name of Omar
Khayyam is mentioned and to call the cult a "lunacy." It is perhaps
unfortunate that FitzGerald gave that somewhat formidable title to his
paraphrase, or translation, of the old Persian poet. It is not the fault
of those who admire that poem exceedingly that it gives them a suspicion
of affecting a scholarship that they do not in most cases possess. What
many of us admire is not Omar Khayyam the Persian, nor have we any desire
to see or to know any other translation of that poet. We simply admit to
an honest appreciation of the poem by Edward FitzGerald, the Suffolk
squire, the poem that Tennyson describes as "the one thing done divinely
well." That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the English
language, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an East
Anglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celtic
quality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an East
Anglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea.

Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It is
astonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I might
give you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out of
East Anglia. Crabbe must have had one in mind when he wrote of Arabella