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And he rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the Rubaiyat until she ordered a copy of the édition de luxe. In looking back, I always seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings.
No doubt Edward Fitzgerald, who gave us the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" did some other desirable work; but Professor Moulton quotes this paragraph from a popular life of Fitzgerald, published in Dublin: "Not Greece of old in her palmiest days the Greece of Homer and Demosthenes, of Eschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, of Pericles, Leonidas, and Alcibiades, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Solon and Lycurgus, of Apelles and Praxiteles not even this Greece, prolific as she was in sages and heroes, can boast such a lengthy bead-roll as Ireland can of names immortal in history!"
It was a morocco-bound edition of Omar's Rubaiyat, which she had often noticed at the apartment in Vivian Court, yet she studied the title deliberately, and also the frontispiece, before she turned to the pages that enclosed the letter.
The vogue of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is in large measure due to the haunting sense of man's ignorance of his place in the world. Who set the stage and placed the puppets on it? Primitive man always answered his questions in terms of Beings like himself, although more powerful and longer lived. All agency was for him personal agency.
The letter begins with a reference to M. Garcin de Tassy and his "annual oration," and continues with some passages of great interest concerning the Rubaiyat and Attar's "Birds." "I have come here to wind up accounts for our Herring-lugger: much against us as the season has been a bad one.
For particulars you might read up on "Romeo and Juliet," and Abraham Lincoln's thrilling sonnet about "You can fool some of the people," &c., and Darwin's works. But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar's Rubaiyat.
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