ll, chill'; and he 'did not like
seeing her so distress'd'; remembering boyish days, and her good old
Vicar (of course I mean the _former_ one: pious, charitable, venerable
Francis Cunningham), and looking to lie under her walls, among his own
people--'if not,' as he said, '_somewhere else_.' Some months after,
seeing the Church with her southern side restored to the sun, the same
speaker cried, 'Well done, Old Girl! Up, and crow again!'"

* * * * *

FitzGerald's hesitancy about Major Moor's book was typical of the man. I
am assured by Mr John Loder of Woodbridge, who knew him well, that it was
inordinately difficult to get him to do anything. First he would be
delighted with the idea, and next he would raise up a hundred objections;
then, maybe, he would again, and finally he wouldn't. The wonder then
is, not that he published so little, but that he published so much; and
to whom the credit thereof was largely due is indicated in this passage
from a letter of Mr W. B. Donne's, of date 25th March 1876.

"I am so delighted at the glory E. F. G. has gained by his translation
of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The 'Contemporary Review' and the
'Spectator' newspaper! It is full time that Fitz should be
disinterred, and exhibited to the world as one of the most gifted of
Britons. And Bernard Quaritch deserves a piece of plate or a statue
for the way he has thrust the Rubaiyat to the front."

There is no understanding FitzGerald till one fully realises that vulgar
ambition had absolutely no place in his nature. Your ass in the lion's
skin nowadays is the ass who fain would be lionised; and the modern
version of the parable of the talents is too often the man who,
untalented, tries to palm off Brummagem counterfeits. FitzGerald's fear
was not that he would write worse than half his compeers, but that he
might write as ill. "This visionary inactivity," he tells John Allen,
"is better than the mischievous activity of so many I see about me." He
applied Malthus's teaching to literature; he was content so long as he
pleased the Tennysons, some half-dozen other friends, and himself, than
whom no critic ever was more fastidious. And when one thinks of all the
"great poems" that were published during his lifetime, and read and
praised (more praised than read perhaps), and then forgotten, one wonders
if, after all, he was so wholly wrong in that he read for profit and
scribbled for amusement,--that he c