Edward FitzGerald

“ A very noble character has passed away.’ On the following Tuesday, June 19, he was buried in the little churchyard of Boulge, and the stone which marks his grave bears the simple inscription ‘Edward FitzGerald, Born 31 March 1809, Died 14 June 1883. It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.’
For some time before his death he seems to have had a foreboding that the end was not far distant. ”

“ We keep early hours in the country. So you will be able exactly to measure my aptitude and fullness for letter writing by the quantity written now, before I bolt off for hat, gloves, and prayerbook. I always put on my thickest great coat to go to our Church in: as fungi grow in great numbers about the communion table. And now, to turn away from Boulge, I must tell you that I went up to London a month ago to see old Thackeray, who had come there to have his eyes doctored. I stayed with him ten days and we were as usual together. Alfred came up ‘in transitu’ from Boxley to Cheltenham ”

“ But pray write to me. You can always direct to me at Donne’s, 12 St. James’ Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe’s, Bredfield, Woodbridge. Either way the letter will soon reach me. Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear how you and yours are: and don’t wait, as you usually do, for some inundation p. 291of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so shortly and whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell you of Friends. I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved and whose death-bed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon. ”

“ Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun;
Which cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar: and your Omar drew
Full-handed plaudits from our best
In modern letters....
Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
[Pg 1]
LIFE OF EDWARD FITZGERALD. Edward FitzGerald was born in the year 1809, at Bredfield House, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, being the third son of John Purcell, who, subsequently to his marriage with a Miss FitzGerald, assumed the name and arms proper to his wife’s family. ”

“ I think your Leamington Country is more in Leaf than ours ‘down-East:’ which only just begins to ‘stand in a mist of green.’ [260] By the by, I lately heard from Hallam Tennyson that all his Party were well enough; not having been to London this Spring because Alfred’s Doctor had warned him against London Fogs, which suppress Perspiration, and bring up Gout. Which is the best piece of news in my Letter; and I am
Yours always and a Day
E. F.G.
P.S. I do not enclose Mowbray’s letter, as I had intended to do, for fear of my own not finding you. ”

“ Lord Edward himself languished for some time, and died in great agony on the 3d of June, from a pistol shot which took effect on his shoulder. Lord Edward Fitzgerald might be regarded as an injured man. From the exuberant generosity of his temper, he had powerfully sympathized with the French republicans at an early stage of their revolution; and having, with great indiscretion, but an indiscretion that admitted of some palliation in so young a man and of so ardent a temperament, publicly avowed his sympathy, he was ignominiously dismissed from the army. ”

“ I only don’t write to him because my doing so would impose on his Conscience an Answer—which would torment him for some little while. I do not love him the less: and believe all the while that he not the less regards me.”
Again on May 5, he wrote: “I think I shall have a word about M [acready] from Mrs. Kemble, with whom I have been corresponding a little since her return to England. She has lately been staying with her Son in Law, Mr. Leigh (?) , at Stoneleigh Vicarage, near Kenilworth. In the Autumn she says she will go to America, never to return to England. But I tell her she will return. ”

“ He (the Father) has a Review of Macready—laudatory, I suppose—in the Edinburgh, and Mr. p. 76Helen Faucit (Martin) as injurious a one in the Quarterly: the reason of the latter being (it is supposed) because Mrs. H. F. is not noticed except just by name. To this Complexion also!
Ever yours,
E. F.G.
Since writing as above, your Letter comes; as you do not speak of moving, I shall send Spedding and Carlyle by Post to you, in spite of the Loss of Income you tell me of which would (I doubt) close up my thoughts some while from such speculations. I do not think you will take trouble so to heart. ”

“ I think you will soon call me ‘Les FitzGeralds’ as Madame de Sévigné called her too officious friend ‘Les Hacquevilles.’ However, I will risk that in sending you a Copy of that first Draught of an opening to Hyperion. I have got it from that Finsbury Circus Houghton, who gave me the first Copy, which I keep: so you shall have this, if you please; I know no one more worthy of it; and indeed I told Lord H. I wanted it for you; so you see he bears no malice. He is in truth a very good natured fellow. . . .
Well, to leave that, he writes me that he had the original MS.: it was stolen from him. ”

“ Tom Taylor, years ago, told me that Miss Ellen Terry would be a consummate comic actress. Portia should never be without some one to set her before the Public. She is my model woman.’
[97a] See ‘Letters,’ ii. 192
[97b] See the Athenæum for Jan. 1, 15, 22, 29, 1876.
[100] In her ‘Further Records,’ i. 250, Mrs. Kemble wrote, March 11th, 1876:—
‘Last week my old friend Edward Fitzgerald (Omar Kyam, you know) , sent me a beautiful miniature of my mother, which his mother—her intimate friend—had kept till her death, and which had been painted for Mrs. Fitzgerald. ”

“ Meanwhile, I go about in my little Ship, where I do think I have two honest Fellows to deal with.
p. 82We have just been boarding a Woodbridge Vessel that we met in these Roads, and drinking a Bottle of Blackstrap round with the Crew.
With me just at present is my Brother Peter, for whose Wife (a capital Irishwoman, of the Mrs. O’Dowd Type) my Paper is edged with Black. No one could be a better Husband than he; no one more attentive and anxious during her last Illness, more than a year long ”

“ Aldis Wright, whose courtesy and kindliness, the courtesy and kindliness from a veteran to a tyro which is so encouraging to the tyro, have been beyond any expression of thanks which I can phrase. I hope that the letters and notes may help to make a side of FitzGerald, the simple human manly side, better known, and to enable my readers to judge his memory from the point of view of those old shrimpers by the new basin as a “good gennleman,” as a noble-hearted, courageous man, as well as the more artificial scholar who quotes Attic scholiasts in a playful way as though they were school classics. ”

“ Oriel opposite, and the Militia in Broad Street, and the old Canary-coloured Sofa and the Cocoa or Tea on the Table! . . .
I should think Bramford begins to look pretty about this time, hey, Mr. Cowell? And Mrs. Cowell? There is a house there constantly advertised to let in the Papers. I think that one by the Mill; not the pleasant place where Trygæus [322] looked forth on the Rail! ‘The Days are gone when Beauty bright, etc.’ . . .
Spedding has been once here in near three months. His Bacon keeps coming out: his part, the Letters, etc., of Bacon, is not come yet ”

“ Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate [Pg 208] friend of all its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather unfrequent one, to papers, and as a writer of singular and extraordinary quality but difficult to class under a more precise head, may be noticed Edward FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly admired by his friends but quite unknown to the public, became famous late in life by his translation of Omar Khayyám, and familiar somewhat after his death through the publication of his charming letters by Mr. ”

“ But for the present here I am, at 19 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, come up to have a fresh squabble with Lawyers, and to see to an old College friend who is gone mad, and threatens to drive his wife mad too, I think. Here are troubles, if you p. 272like: I mean, these poor people’s. Well, I have not had much time except to post about in Omnibi between Lincoln’s Inn and Bayswater: but I have seen Alfred once; Carlyle once; Thackeray twice; and Spedding many times. ”

“ I shall be at Wherstead all July—after that I know not where, but probably in Suffolk. Farewell, my best of fellows: there is no use saying how much I wish that all your sorrow will be turned to hope, and all your hope to joy. As far as we men can judge, you are worthy of all earthly happiness.
* * * * *
At the end of July, 1835, FitzGerald writes from Wherstead to Thackeray, who was then in Paris studying art:
‘My Father is determined to inhabit an empty house of his about fourteen miles off: [38] and we are very sorry to leave this really beautiful place. The other house has no great merit. ”

“ It will almost make you smell them all the way from Calcutta. ‘All the Glory going!’ What has put me upon beginning with this Sheet so soon is, that, (having done my Will for the present with the Mantic—one reason being that I am afraid to meddle more with N. Newton’s tender MS., and another reason that I now lay by what I have sketched out so as to happen on it again one day with fresh eyes) —I say, this p. 322being shelved, I took up old Hafiz again, and began with him where I left off in November at Brighton. ”

“ E. FitzGerald.
[Boulge Hall] ,
Tuesday, January 10, 1837.
My dear Allen,
Another letter in so short a time will surprise you. My old Lady will be glad of a new edition of Jeremy Taylor, beside the old one. I remember you once gave me a very nice large duodecimo one: are these to be had, and cheap? It must have a good type, to suit old eyes. When you are possessed of these and the other books I begged you to ask for (except the Bacon which is for myself) do me one favour more: which is to book them per Coach at the White Horse, Piccadilly, directed to Mrs. Schutz, Gillingham Hall, Beccles. ”

“ We answered, "Be it what you please." "Well," he said, "let us make a vow, that to whomsoever this fortune falls, he shall share it equally with the rest, and reserve no pre-eminence for himself." "Be it so," we both replied, and on those terms we mutually pledged our words. Years rolled on, and I went from Khorassan to Transoxiana, and wandered to Ghazni and Cabul ”

“ In February 1874 Fitzgerald was returned to parliament for the third time for the borough of Horsham, and sat until November 1875, when he was appointed chief commissioner of charities in England. Fitzgerald, who was an honorary D.C.L. Oxon. (1863) , and a magistrate and deputy-lieutenant of Sussex, died at his residence in Warwick Square, London, 28 June 1885. He married in 1846 Maria Triphena, eldest daughter of the late Edward Seymour, M.D., and by her, who died in 1865, left issue. ”

“ But before Posh was hard at it every day, fishing off the Norfolk coast, his “guv’nor” wrote him a note in a much more cheerful strain. Indeed, this is a letter by itself, unlike any other of the writer’s which I have seen, though (as Dr. Aldis Wright says) “FitzGerald never wrote a letter like any one else.” The power of throwing himself “into the picture,” the humour of conscious imitation, were never more brilliantly illustrated than by this hail-fellow-well-met letter, written by the scholar and poet:—
“Markethill, Woodbridge, Wednesday. ”

“ I think I told you in my last that I had desired De Tassy to say nothing about you in any Paper he should write; since I cannot have you answerable for any blunders I may have made in my Copy, nor may you care to be named with Omar at all. I hope the Frenchman will attend to my desire; and I dare say he will, as he will then have all credit to himself. He says he can’t make out the metre of the rubayát at all—never could—though ‘I am enough skilful in scanning the Persian verses as you have seen’ (Qy?) ‘in my Prosody of the languages of Musulman Countries, etc.’ So much for De Tassy. No ”

“ A schoolmaster had never heard of either FitzGerald or Omar.
It was plain that the educated classes of Lowestoft could help me in my search but little. So I went down to the harbour basins and the fish wharves, and asked of “Posh” and his “governor.”
Not a jolly boatman of middle age in the harbour but knew of both. “D’ye mean Joe Fletcher, master?” said one of them. “What—old Posh? Why yes! Alive an’ kickin’, and go a shrimpin’ when the weather serve. He live up in Chapel Street. ”

“ Posh tells how his “guv’nor” would clap him on the back and laugh heartily over a “salwagin’” story. “You sea pirates!” he would say. “You sea pirates!”
In the spring of 1866 FitzGerald stayed at 12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft, in March and April, and passed most of his time with Posh. In the evenings he would sit and smoke a pipe, or play “all-fours.” In the day he liked to go to sea with Posh in the latter’s punt, the Little Wonder. The Scandal was not launched that year till June, and although he “got perished with the N.E. wind” (Two Suffolk Friends, p. 101) , he revelled in the rough work. ”

“ Kemble who described him as ‘an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it,’ and this description is fully borne out by the account she gave of him in the offending passage which follows:—
“That Mrs. Fitzgerald is among the most vivid memories of my girlish days. She and her husband were kind and intimate friends of my father and mother. He was a most amiable and genial Irish gentleman, with considerable property in Ireland and Suffolk, and a fine house in Portland Place, and had married his cousin, a very handsome, clever, and eccentric woman. ”