FITZGERALD. 688 FITZGERALD. a revolutionary banquet at which he expressed republican sympathies and renounced his title of nobility. During this visit he married the puta- tive daughter of Philippe 'Egalite,' Duke of Orleans, and Madame Genlis, the celebrated Pamela, who was afterwards discovered to be the child of Mary Sims, of Newfoundland, by De Brixey, a French captain. They returned to Ireland .and lived at Kildare. the union proving particularly happy. His sympathies with the struggles of his countrymen led him to join the United Irishmen in 1796, and he went to France to arrange, with the Directory, an invasion to support an Irish revolution. Soon after hi-- return the plot became known to the English Govern- ment, and Fitzgei'ald, after a desperate resist- ance, during which he was severely wounded, was captured and died in prison on June 4, 17HS. His widow married Jlr. Pitcairn, American Consul at Hamburg, but soon separated from him, and after a checkered existence, died in poverty in Paris in 1831. Consult Moore. Life and Death of Edward Fitzgerald (2d ed., London, 1875). FITZGERALD, Edward (1800-83). An Eng- lish poet, whose exceptional qualities were ob- scured by an equally exceptional modesty, and whose fame is due almost wholly to his transla- tion, from the Persian, of the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam. Although of Irish ancestry, he was born at Bredfield House, near the market town of Woodbridge, in Suffolk: and it was here that he elected to spend his life in strict seclusion — almost a hermit's life in its sequestered tranquil- lity and remoteness from the outside world. The family name was Purcell, but on his grandfather FitzGerald's death (1818), his father took the arms and the name of his wife. He was educated at Trinity College. Cambridge, taking his degree in 1830, and there formed lifelong friendships with men since famous, among others Spedding and Thackeray. With the Tennysons he did not become intimate until later. A good picture of FitzGerald's academic life is preserved in l:'u- phranor, his earliest printed work — a sort of Platonic dialogue, in which the speakers arc thinly disguised under symbolic or classical names; and his lasting fondness for Cambridge is proved by the occasional visits he made down to 'his closing years. His brief experience of mar- ried life resulted unhappily. His wife was Lucy, daughter of Bernard Barton, the Quaker port of Woodbridge, and one of FitzGerald's closest friends. But he was temperamentally unfitted for matrimony, and they soon separated by mutual consent. Henceforth he contented himself with the companionship of his honk-- and the luxury of a lew chosen friendships. His simple life was varied by occasionally "pottering about the mid- land counties of England," or taking short coast- ing trips in his own yacht. A typical summer is described in his own words, as follows: "A little Bedfordshin — a little Northamptonshire a little more lidding of the hands the Same laces — the same fields the same thoughts occurring at Ihr same turns of road this is all 1 have to tell of: nothing at all added- bu1 the summer gone " In literature, a- In other Ihiiejs. FitzGerald was ;ui epicure. He read slowly and of none hut the iM'st. Sophocles and Tacitus, Homer and i peare weir the authors that he lived with. The Greek Anthology occupied him an entire sea- son. Probably no waiter who took the trouble to publish his writings has ever been so indifferent to their fate as FitzGerald. Just what first awoke him from his dreams among hi- turnips and spurred him on to authorship i- not clear. In 1846 Carlyle and Professor Cowell, the Oriental- ist, became factors of importance in his life, and it may have been in a measure due to such mental stimulus that five years latei Euphranor was published — anonymously, as with one exception were all his writings. A year later appeared Polonius, a collection of wise saw- gathered from his favorite books and interesting to-day chiefly for its graceful preface. In 1853. the first of his famous translations appeared, Six Dramas nf Calderon, with his own name appended; but an attack by an undiscriminating and unknown re- viewer in the A tin urnim effectually dampened his brief desire for personal glory ; and neither the praise of men like Carlyle, Thackeray, and James Russell Lowell, nor the Calderon medal sent, he "doubts not, at Mr. Lowell's instance," could tempt him to write again under his own signa- ture, l'itzt icrald's intimacy with Professor Cowell. which had ripened while they read to- gether the plays of Calderon. culminated in their study of the Persian poets, and bore important fruit in FitzGerald's translation of the Sal&m&n and Absdl, of Jami, in 18.~>fi. and the Rubdiydt three years later. The story of how the now famous quatrains first claimed public attention is well known. FitzGerald offered some of 'the less wicked' of them to Frazer's Magazine; but as they failed to appear, he made a present of them, two years later, to his publisher. Mr. Quar- itch, who issued them in a brown-covered pam- phlet, at five shillings. In course of time they found their way to a penny box outside the bookseller's door. It was there that Mr. Whiteley Stokes bought the copy which he gave to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who in turn passed it oil to Mr. Swin- burne, and thus laid the foundation of the Omar cult in England. Only once after this did FitzGerald arouse him- self to activity — in the winter of 1864-65. when he published two more Calderon plays and his version of the Agamemnon. Each year his life grew quieter; his days were spent "in boat or vessel as in a moving chair, dispensing a little grog and shag to those who do the work." There i- less and less of literature in his correspond- ence. Xew books did not appeal to him, and he could sec little merit in Emerson, George Eliot, or Victor Hugo. His old hooks continued to suf- fice: and the only new taste that he formed late in life was for the poems of Crabbe. And by a curious coincidence, he died while on a visit to the home of Rev. Geo. Crabbe, a grandson of the poet Whatever merit FitzGerald's other writings possess, there is no question that thej are quite eclipsed by his famous rendering of the Rubdiydt. As an instance of the deliberate transplanting of a poet from one nation to another widely sepa- rated by language and ideals and the lapse of cen- turies, and of inning that poet take fresh root and llourish with renewed life, the Rubdiydt stands unique. FitzGerald's theorj of transla- tion was peculiar, lie took great liberties with the original, aiming less to reprodi the cad thought than the atmosphere, ami boldly reject ing whatever, through difference of social or artistic standards, might tend to arouse in Anglo- Saxon mind- thoughts alien to the intention of the poet. Omar Khayyam, almost unknown to
