Note 320 — LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD (continued 5)

This struck E. F. G. so much that he introduced it into Omar Khayyám, stanza xxxiii. Professor Cowell writes, ‘I well remember shewing it to FitzGerald and reading it with him in his early Persian days at Oxford in 1855. I laughed at the quaintness; but the idea seized his imagination from the first, and, like Virgil with Ennius’ rough jewels, his genius detected gold where I had seen only tinsel. He has made two grand lines out of it.’