Edward FitzGerald once declared that he was about the only friend with whom Borrow had never quarrelled. There was probably no reason for this exceptional amity other than the “genius for friendship” with which FitzGerald has been rightly credited. There were certainly, however, many points of likeness between the two men which might have kept them at peace. Both had written copiously and out of all proportion to the public demand for their work. Both revelled in translation. FitzGerald’s eight volumes in a magnificent American edition consist mainly of translations from various tongues which no man presumably now reads. All the world has read and will long continue to read his translation or paraphrase of Omar KhayyÁm’s RubÁiyÁt. “Old Fitz,” as his friends called him, lives by that, although his letters are among the best in literature. Borrow wrote four books that will live, but had publishers been amenable he would have published forty, and all as unsaleable as the major part of FitzGerald’s translations. Both men were Suffolk squires, and yet delighted more in the company of a class other than their own, FitzGerald of boatmen, Borrow of gypsies; both were counted eccentrics in their respective villages. Perhaps alone among the great Victorian authors they lived to be old without receiving in their lives any popular recognition of their great literary achievements, if we except the momentary recognition of The Bible in Spain. But FitzGerald had a more cultivated mind than Borrow. He loved literature and literary men whilst Borrow did not. His criticism of books is of the best, and his friendships with bookmen are among the most interesting in literary history. “A solitary, shy, kind-hearted man,” was the verdict upon him of the frequently censorious Carlyle. When Anne Thackeray asked her father which of his friends he had loved best, he answered “Dear old Fitz, to be sure,” and Tennyson would have said the same. Borrow had none of these gifts as a letter-writer and no genius for friendship. The charm of his style, so indisputable in his best work, is absent from his letters; and his friends were alienated one after another. Borrow’s undisciplined intellect and narrow upbringing were a curse to him, from the point of view of his own personal happiness, although they helped him to achieve exactly the work for which he was best fitted. Borrow’s acquaintance with FitzGerald was commenced by the latter, who, in July, 1853, sent from Boulge Hall, Suffolk, to Oulton Hall, in the same county, his recently published volume Six Dramas of Calderon. He apologises for making so free with “a great man; but, as usual, I shall feel least fear before a man like yourself who both do fine things in your own language and are deep read in those of others.” He also refers to “our common friend Donne,” so that it is probable that they had met at Donne’s house. The next letter, also published by Dr. Knapp, that FitzGerald writes to Borrow is dated from his home in Great Portland Street in 1856. He presents his friend with a Turkish Dictionary, and announces his coming marriage to Miss Barton, “Our united ages amount to 96!—a dangerous experiment on both sides”—as it proved. The first reference to Borrow in the FitzGerald Letters issued by his authorised publishers is addressed to Professor Cowell in January, 1857:

I was with Borrow a week ago at Donne’s, and also at Yarmouth three months ago: he is well, but not yet agreed with Murray. He read me a long translation he had made from the Turkish: which I could not admire, and his taste becomes stranger than ever.

But Borrow’s genius if not his taste was always admired by FitzGerald, as the following letter among my Borrow Papers clearly indicates. Borrow had published The Romany Rye at the beginning of May:

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall

Goldington Hall, Bedford, May 24/57.

My dear Sir,—Your Book was put into my hands a week ago just as I was leaving London; so I e’en carried it down here, and have been reading it under the best Circumstances:—at such a Season—in the Fields as they now are—and in company with a Friend I love best in the world—who scarce ever reads a Book, but knows better than I do what they are made of from a hint.

Well, lying in a Paddock of his, I have been travelling along with you to Horncastle, etc.,—in a very delightful way for the most part; something as I have travelled, and love to travel, with Fielding, Cervantes, and Robinson Crusoe—and a smack of all these there seems to me, with something beside, in your book. But, as will happen in Travel, there were some spots I didn’t like so well—didn’t like at all: and sometimes wished to myself that I, a poor “Man of Taste,” had been at your Elbow (who are a Man of much more than Taste) to divert you, or get you by some means to pass lightlier over some places. But you wouldn’t have heeded me, and won’t heed me, and must go your own way, I think—And in the parts I least like, I am yet thankful for honest, daring, and original Thought and Speech such as one hardly gets in these mealy-mouthed days. It was very kind of you to send me your book.

My Wife is already established at a House called “Albert’s Villa,” or some such name, at Gorlestone—but a short walk from you: and I am to find myself there in a few days. So I shall perhaps tell you more of my thoughts ere long. Now I shall finish this large Sheet with a Tetrastich of one Omar Khayyam who was an Epicurean Infidel some 500 years ago:

A tetrastich of Omar KhayyÁm [229]

and am yours very truly,
Edward FitzGerald.

In a letter to Cowell about the same time—June 5, 1857—FitzGerald writes that he is about to set out for Gorleston, Great Yarmouth:

Within hail almost lives George Borrow, who has lately published, and given me, two new volumes of Lavengro called Romany Rye, with some excellent things, and some very bad (as I have made bold to write to him—how shall I face him!) You would not like the book at all I think.

It was Cowell, it will be remembered, who introduced FitzGerald to the Persian poet Omar, and afterwards regretted the act. The first edition of The RubÁiyÁt of Omar KhayyÁm appeared two years later, in 1859. Edward Byles Cowell was born in Ipswich in 1826, and he was educated at the Ipswich Grammar School. It was in the library attached to the Ipswich Library Institution that Cowell commenced the study of Oriental languages. In 1842 he entered the business of his father and grandfather as a merchant and maltster. When only twenty years of age he commenced his friendship with Edward FitzGerald, and their correspondence may be found in Dr. Aldis Wright’s FitzGerald Correspondence. In 1850 he left his brother to carry on the business and entered himself at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he passed six years. At intervals he read Greek with FitzGerald and, later, Persian. FitzGerald commenced to learn this last language, which was to bring him fame, when he was forty-four years of age. In 1856 Cowell was appointed to a Professorship of English History at Calcutta, and from there he sent FitzGerald a copy of the manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm, afterwards lent by FitzGerald to Borrow. Much earlier than this—in 1853—FitzGerald had written to Borrow:

At Ipswich, indeed, is a man whom you would like to know, I think, and who would like to know you; one Edward Cowell: a great scholar, if I may judge. . . . Should you go to Ipswich do look for him! a great deal more worth looking for (I speak with no sham modesty, I am sure) than yours,—E. F. G.

Twenty-six years afterwards—in 1879—we find FitzGerald writing to Dr. Aldis Wright to the effect that Cowell had been seized with “a wish to learn Welsh under George Borrow”:

And as he would not venture otherwise, I gave him a Note of Introduction, and off he went, and had an hour with the old Boy, who was hard of hearing and shut up in a stuffy room, but cordial enough; and Cowell was glad to have seen the Man, and tell him that it was his Wild Wales which first inspired a thirst for this language into the Professor.

There is one short letter from FitzGerald to Borrow in Dr. Aldis Wright’s FitzGerald Letters. It is dated June, 1857, and from it we learn that FitzGerald lent Borrow the Calcutta manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm, upon which he based his own immortal translation, and from a letter to W. H. Thompson in 1861 we learn that Cowell, who had inspired the writing of FitzGerald’s Omar KhayyÁm, Donne and Borrow were the only three friends to whom he had sent copies of his “peccadilloes in verse” as he calls his remarkable translation, and this two years after it was published. A letter, dated July 6, 1857, asks for the return of FitzGerald’s copy of the Ouseley manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm, Borrow having clearly already returned the Calcutta manuscript. This letter concludes on a pathetic note:

My old Parson Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village church sward. Why, our time seems coming. Make way, gentlemen!

Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald’s great translation of Omar KhayyÁm, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the

“. . . golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well,”

to quote Tennyson’s famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald’s dolce far niente paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the manuscript of Omar Khayyam’s RubÁiyÁt in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. “Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me,” he wrote to Cowell. “Borrow is greatly delighted with your MS. of Omar which I showed him,” he says in another letter to Cowell (23rd June, 1857), “delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.”

The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the RubÁiyÁt:

To George Borrow, Esq.

10 Marine Parade, Lowestoft.

My dear Borrow,—I have come here with three nieces to give them sea air and change. They are all perfectly quiet, sensible, and unpretentious girls; so as, if you will come over here any day or days, we will find you board and bed too, for a week longer at any rate. There is a good room below, which we now only use for meals, but which you and I can be quite at our sole ease in. Won’t you come?

I purpose (and indeed have been some while intentioning) to go over to Yarmouth to look for you. But I write this note in hope it may bring you hither also.

Donne has got his soldier boy home from India—Freddy—I always thought him a very nice fellow indeed. No doubt life is happy enough to all of them just now. Donne has been on a visit to the Highlands—which seems to have pleased him—I have got an MS. of Bahram and his Seven Castles (Persian), which I have not yet cared to look far into. Will you? It is short, fairly transcribed, and of some repute in its own country, I hear. Cowell sent it me from Calcutta; but it almost requires his company to make one devote one’s time to Persian, when, with what remains of one’s old English eyes, one can read the Odyssey and Shakespeare.

With compliments to the ladies, believe me, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.

I didn’t know you were back from your usual summer tour till Mr. Cobb told my sister lately of having seen you.

To George Borrow, Esq.

Bath House, Lowestoft, October 10/59.

Dear Borrow,—This time last year I was here and wrote to ask about you. You were gone to Scotland. Well, where are you now? As I also said last year: “If you be in Yarmouth and have any mind to see me I will go over some day; or here I am if you will come here. And I am quite alone. As it is I would bus it to Yarmouth but I don’t know if you and yours be there at all, nor if there, whereabout. If I don’t hear at all I shall suppose you are not there, on one of your excursions, or not wanting to be rooted out; a condition I too well understand. I was at Gorleston some months ago for some while; just after losing my greatest friend, the Bedfordshire lad who was crushed to death, coming home from hunting, his horse falling on him. He survived indeed two months, and I had been to bid him eternal adieu, so had no appetite for anything but rest—rest—rest. I have just seen his widow off from here. With kind regards to the ladies, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.