ut entered on
the life of reading, thinking, gardening, and boating, which he pursued
for more than half a century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from
Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend,
and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker and
friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of the century
had opened, when _Euphranor_, written long before at Cambridge, or with
reference to it, appeared. Then he learnt Spanish, and first showed his
extraordinary faculty of translation by Englishing divers dramas of
Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian, and after some exercises
elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase, or whatever it is to be
called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam appeared in 1859, to be much
altered in subsequent editions.

FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three pretty
stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he was first
of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) have been
added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to _Euphranor_, a
dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, and other things) he
interests us doubly as a character and as a critic, for the letters
contain much criticism. Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather few
and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to make new
friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate towards the old,
with a very strong distaste for crowds and general society, and
undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a _maniaque_, that is to
say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer. These characteristics, which
make him interesting as a man, are still more interestingly reflected in
his criticism, which is often one-sided and unjust, sometimes crotchety
(as when he would not admit that even his beloved Alfred Tennyson had
ever been at his best since the collection of 1842), but often also
wonderfully delicate and true.

As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable
alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally and
once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyam that in narrow space it
is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and pedantic point
of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever
renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with perfect
freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no other
translator has ever