al burnings, from a visit that I paid to Woodbridge in
the summer of 1889, and from reminiscences and unpublished letters
furnished by friends of FitzGerald, I purpose to weave a patchwork
article, which shall in some ways supplement Mr Aldis Wright's edition of
his Letters. {70} Those letters surely will take a high place in
literature, on their own merits, quite apart from the interest that
attaches to the translator of Omar Khayyam, to the friend of Thackeray,
Tennyson, and Carlyle. Here and there I may cite them; but whoso will
know FitzGerald must go to the fountain-head. And yet that the letters
by themselves may convey a false impression of the man is evident from
several articles on them--the best and worst Mr Gosse's in the
'Fortnightly' (July 1889). Mr Gosse sums him up in the statement that
"his time, when the roses were not being pruned, and when he was not
making discreet journeys in uneventful directions, was divided between
music, which greatly occupied his younger thought, and literature, which
slowly, but more and more exclusively, engaged his attention." There is
truth in the statement; still this pruner of roses, who of rose-pruning
knew absolutely nothing, was one who best loved the sea when the sea was
rough, who always put into port of a Sunday that his men might "get their
hot dinner." He was one who would give his friend of the best--oysters,
maybe, and audit ale, which "dear old Thompson" used to send him from
Trinity--and himself the while would pace up and down the room, munching
apple or turnip, and drinking long draughts of milk. He was a man of
marvellous simplicity of life and matchless charity: hereon I will quote
a letter of Professor Cowell's, who did, if any one, know FitzGerald
well:--

"He was no Sybarite. There was a vein of strong scorn of all self-
indulgence in him, which was very different. He was, of course, very
much of a recluse, with a vein of misanthropy towards men in the
abstract, joined to a tender-hearted sympathy for the actual men and
women around him. He was the very reverse of Carlyle's description of
the sentimental philanthropist, who loves man in the abstract, but is
intolerant of 'Jack and Tom, who have wills of their own.'"

FitzGerald's charities are probably forgotten, unless by the recipients;
and how many of them must be dead, old soldiers as they mostly were, and
suchlike! But this I have heard, that one man borrowed 200 pou