history, by Farruchani, Ramin, and especially by the Dihkan Danishwar (A.D. 651). The work of this Danishwar, the "Chodainameh" (Book of Kings), deserves to be specially singled out. It was written, not in neo-Persian and Arabic script, but in what scholars call middle-Persian and in what is known as the Pahlavi writing. It was from this "Chodainameh" that Abu Mansur, lord of Tus, had a "Shбh Nбmeh" of his own prepared in the neo-Persian. And then, to complete the tale, in 980 a certain Zoroastrian whose name was Dakiki versified a thousand lines of this neo-Persian Book of Kings.

In this very city of Tus, Abul Kasim Mansur (or Ahmed) Firdusi was born, A.D. 935. One loves to think that perhaps he got his name from the Persian-Arabic word for garden; for, verily, it was he that gathered into one garden all the beautiful flowers which had blossomed in the fancy of his people. As he has draped the figures in his great epic, so has an admiring posterity draped his own person. His fortune has been interwoven with the fame of that Mahmud of Ghazna (998-1030), the first to bear the proud title of "Sultan," the first to carry Mohammed and the prophets into India. The Round Table of Mahmud cannot be altogether a figment of the imagination. With such poets as Farruchi, Unsuri, Minutsheri, with such scientists as Biruni and Avicenna as intimates, what wonder that Firdusi was lured by the splendors of a court life! But before he left his native place he must have finished his epic, at least in its rough form; for we know that in 999 he dedicated it to Ahmad ibn Muhammad of Chalandsha. He had been working at it steadily since 971, but had not yet rounded it out according to the standard which he had set for himself. Occupying the position almost of a court poet, he continued to work for Mahmud, and this son of a Turkish slave became a patron of letters. On February 25, 1010, his work was finished. As poet laureate, he had inserted many a verse in praise of his master. Yet the story goes, that though this master had covenanted for a gold dirhem a line, he sent Firdusi sixty thousand silver ones, which the poet spurned and distributed as largesses and hied him from so ungenerous a master.

It is a pretty tale. Yet some great disappointment must have been his lot, for a lampoon which he wrote a short time afterwards is filled with the bitterest satire upon the prince whose praises he had sung so beautifully. Happily, the satire does not seem to have gotten under the eyes of Mahmud; it was bought off by a friend, for one thousand dirhems a verse. But Firdusi was a wanderer; we find him in Herat, in Taberistбn, and then at the Buyide Court of Bagdad, where he composed his "Yusuf and Salikha," a poem as Mohammedan in spirit as the "Shбh Nбmeh" was Persian. In 1021, or 1025, he returned to Tus to die, and to be buried in his own garden—because his mind had not been orthodox enough that his body should rest in sacred ground. At the last moment—the story takes up again—Mahmud repented and sent the poet the coveted gold. The gold arrived at one gate while Firdusi's body was being carried by at another; and it was spent by his daughter in the building of a hospice near the city. For the sake of Mahmud let us try to believe the tale.

We know much about the genesis of this great epic, the "Shбh Nбmeh"; far more than we know about the make-up of the other great epics in the world's literature. Firdusi worked from written materials; but he produced no mere labored mosaic. Into it all he has breathed a spirit of freshness and vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Zбl and Rodhale, of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtбsp and Kitayim. That he was also an excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the death of his only son; a curious intermingling of his personal woes with 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 Irбnian 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 Khayyбm 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 Khayyбm 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-Khayyбm—not himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths of our own day—was of the city of Nнshapъr. The invention of the Rubбiyбt, or Epigram, is not to his credit. That honor belongs to Abu Said of Khorasan (968-1049), who used it as a means of expressing his mystic pantheism. But there is an Omar Khayyбm club in London—not one bearing the name of Abu Said. What is the bond which binds the Rubбiyбt-maker in far-off Persia to the literati of modern Anglo-Saxondom?

By his own people Omar was persecuted for his want of orthodoxy; and yet his grave to this day is held in much honor. By others he was looked upon as a Mystic. Reading the five hundred or so authentic quatrains one asks, Which is the real Omar? Is it he who sings of wine and of pleasure, who seems to preach a life of sensual enjoyment? or is it the stern preacher, who criticises all, high and low; priest, dervish, and Mystic—yea, even God himself? I venture to say that the real Omar is both; or, rather, he is something higher than is adequately expressed in these two words. The Ecclesiastes of Persia, he was weighed down by the great questions of life and death and morality, as was he whom people so wrongly call "the great sceptic of the Bible." The "Weltschmerz" was his, and he fought hard within himself to find that mean way which philosophers delight in pointing out. If at times Omar does preach carpe diem, if he paint in his exuberant fancy the delights of carousing, Fitzgerald is right—he bragged more than he drank. The under-current of a serious view of life runs through all he has written; the love of the beautiful in nature—a sense of the real worth of certain things and the worthlessness of the Ego. Resignation to what is man's evident fate; doing well what every day brings to be done—this is his own answer. It was Job's—it was that of Ecclesiastes.

This same "Weltschmerz" is ours to-day; therefore Omar Khayyбm is of us beloved. He speaks what often we do not dare to speak; one of his quatrains can be more easily quoted than some of those thoughts can be formulated. And then he is picturesque—picturesque because he is at times ambiguous. Omar seems to us to have been so many things—a believing Moslem, a pantheistic Mystic, an exact scientist (for he reformed the Persian calendar).