CAMELOT FANTASIES

<2>Though all these, like our Smiths, Archers, Millers, Fletchers,
   etc., may simply retain the Surname of an hereditary calling.

"We have only one more anecdote to give of his Life, and that relates
 to the close; it is told in the anonymous preface which is sometimes
 prefixed to his poems; it has been printed in the Persian in the
 Appendix to Hyde's Veterum Persarum Religio, p. 499; and D'Herbelot
 alludes to it in his Bibliotheque, under Khiam.<3>--

"'It is written in the chronicles of the ancients that this King of
 the Wise, Omar Khayyam, died at Naishapur in the year of the Hegira,
 517 (A.D. 1123); in science he was unrivaled,--the very paragon of his
 age. Khwajah Nizami of Samarcand, who was one of his pupils, relates
 the following story: "I often used to hold conversations with my
 teacher, Omar Khayyam, in a garden; and one day he said to me,
 'My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses
 over it.'  I wondered at the words he spake, but I knew that his were
 no idle words.<4>  Years after, when I chanced to revisit Naishapur, I
 went to his final resting-place, and lo! it was just outside a garden,
 and trees laden with fruit stretched their boughs over the garden
 wall, and dropped their flowers upon his tomb, so that the stone was
 hidden under them."'"

  <3>"Philosophe Musulman qui a vecu en Odeur de Saintete dans sa
   Religion, vers la Fin du premier et le Commencement du second
   Siecle," no part of which, except the "Philosophe," can apply to our
   Khayyam.
   
   <4>The Rashness of the Words, according to D'Herbelot, consisted in
   being so opposed to those in the Koran: "No Man knows where he shall
   die."--This story of Omar reminds me of another so naturally--and
   when one remembers how wide of his humble mark the noble sailor
   aimed--so pathetically told by Captain Cook--not by Doctor
   Hawkworth--in his Second Voyage (i. 374). When leaving Ulietea,
   "Oreo's last request was for me to return. When he saw he could not
   obtain that promise, he asked the name of my Marai (burying-place).
   As strange a question as this was, I hesitated not a moment to tell
   him 'Stepney'; the parish in which I live when in London. I was
   made to repeat it several times over till they could pronounce it;
   and then 'Stepney Marai no Toote' was echoed through an hundred
   mouths at once. I afterwards found the same question had been put
   to Mr. Forster by a man on shore; but he gave a different, and
   indeed more proper answer, by saying, 'No man who used the sea could
   say where he should be buried.'"

Thus far--without fear of Trespass--from the Calcutta Review. The
 writer of it, on reading in India this story of Omar's Grave, was
 reminded, he says, of Cicero's Account of finding Archimedes' Tomb at
 Syracuse, buried in grass and weeds. I think Thorwaldsen desired to
 have roses grow over him; a wish religiously fulfilled for him to the
 present day, I believe. However, to return to Omar.

Though the Sultan "shower'd Favors upon him," Omar's Epicurean
 Audacity of Thought and Speech caused him to be regarded askance in
 his own Time and Country. He is said to have been especially hated
 and dreaded by the Sufis, whose Practise he ridiculed, and whose Faith
 amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the Mysticism and
 formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their
 Poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the
 most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar's
 material, but turning it to a mystical Use more convenient to
Themselves and the People they addressed; a People quite as quick of
Doubt as of Belief; as keen of Bodily sense as of Intellectual; and
 delighting in a cloudy composition of both, in which they could float
 luxuriously between Heaven and Earth, and this World and the Next, on
 the wings of a poetical expression, that might serve indifferently for
 either. Omar was too honest of Heart as well of Head for this.
 Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding any Providence but
 Destiny, and any World but This, he set about making the most of it;
 preferring rather to soothe the Soul through the Senses into
 Acquiescence with Things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain
 disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that
 his Worldly Ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a
 humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of Sense
 above that of the Intellect, in which he must have taken great
 delight, although it failed to answer the Questions in which he, in
 common with all men, was most vitally interested.

For whatever Reason, however, Omar as before said, has never been
 popular in his own Country, and therefore has been but scantily
 transmitted abroad. The MSS. of his Poems, mutilated beyond the
 average Casualties of Oriental Transcription, are so rare in the East
 as scarce to have reacht Westward at all, in spite of all the
 acquisitions of Arms and Science. There is no copy at the India
 House, none at the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. We know but of
 one in England: No. 140 of the Ouseley MSS. at the Bodleian, written
 at Shiraz, A.D. 1460. This contains but 158 Rubaiyat. One in the
 Asiatic Society's Library at Calcutta (of which we have a Copy),
 contains (and yet incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all kinds
 of Repetition and Corruption. So Von Hammer speaks of his Copy as
 containing about 200, while Dr. Sprenger catalogues the Lucknow MS. at
 double that number.<5>  The Scribes, too, of the Oxford and Calcutta
 MSS. seem to do their Work under a sort of Protest; each beginning
 with a Tetrastich (whether genuine or not), taken out of its
 alphabetical order; the Oxford with one of Apology; the Calcutta with
 one of Expostulation, supposed (says a Notice prefixed to the MS.)
 to have arisen from a Dream, in which Omar's mother asked about his
 future fate. It may be rendered thus:--

"O Thou who burn'st in Heart for those who burn
   In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn,
     How long be crying, 'Mercy on them, God!'
   Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?"

The Bodleian Quatrain pleads Pantheism by way of Justification.

"If I myself upon a looser Creed
   Have loosely strung the Jewel of Good deed,
   Let this one thing for my Atonement plead:
   That One for Two I never did misread."

  <5>"Since this paper was written" (adds the Reviewer in a note), "we
   have met with a Copy of a very rare Edition, printed at Calcutta in
   1836. This contains 438 Tetrastichs, with an Appendix containing 54
   others not found in some MSS."

The Reviewer,<6> to whom I owe the Particulars of Omar's Life,
 concludes his Review by comparing him with Lucretius, both as to
 natural Temper and Genius, and as acted upon by the Circumstances in
 which he lived. Both indeed were men of subtle, strong, and
 cultivated Intellect, fine Imagination, and Hearts passionate for
Truth and Justice; who justly revolted from their Country's false
 Religion, and false, or foolish, Devotion to it; but who fell short of
 replacing what they subverted by such better Hope as others, with no
 better Revelation to guide them, had yet made a Law to themselves.
 Lucretius indeed, with such material as Epicurus furnished, satisfied
himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed,
 and acting by a Law that implied no Legislator; and so composing
himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of Attitude, sat
 down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the Universe which he was
 part Actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime
 description of the Roman Theater) discolored with the lurid reflex of
 the Curtain suspended between the Spectator and the Sun. Omar, more
 desperate, or more careless of any so complicated System as resulted
 in nothing but hopeless Necessity, flung his own Genius and Learning
 with a bitter or humorous jest into the general Ruin which their
 insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and, pretending sensual
pleasure, as the serious purpose of Life, only diverted himself with
 speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and
 Evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down, and
 the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last!