the history of his heroes. A cheerful vigor runs through it all. He
praises the delights of wine-drinking, and does not despise the comforts
which money can procure. In his descriptive parts, in his scenes of
battle and encounters, he is not often led into the delirium of
extravagance. Sober-minded and free from all fanaticism, he leans not
too much to Zoroaster or to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his
Iránian heroes leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so
these fifty or more thousand verses, written in the Arabic heroic
Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of the Persians down to this
very day--when the glories of the land have almost altogether departed
and Mahmud himself is all forgotten of his descendants.

Firdusi introduces us to the greatness of Mahmud of Ghazna's court. Omar
Khayyám takes us into its ruins; for one of the friends of his boyhood
days was Nizam al-Mulk, the grandson of that Toghrul the Turk, who with
his Seljuks had supplanted the Persian power. Omar's other friend was
Ibn Sabbah, the "old Man of the Mountain," the founder of the Assassins.
The doings of both worked misery upon Christian Europe, and entailed a
tremendous loss of life during the Crusades. As a sweet revenge, that
same Europe has taken the first of the trio to its bosom, and has made
of Omar Khayyám a household friend. "My tomb shall be in a spot where
the north wind may scatter roses" is said to have been one of Omar's
last wishes. He little thought that those very roses from the tomb in
which he was laid to rest in 1123 would, in the nineteenth century,
grace the spot where his greatest modern interpreter--Fitzgerald--lies
buried in the little English town of Woodbridge!

The author of the famous Quatrains--Omar Ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyám--not
himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths of our own
day--was of the city of Níshapúr. The invention of the Rubáiyát, or