t is really not
very much to anyone's credit to play the John Ferriar to so careless
a Sterne. He doesn't steal the material for his brooms, he steals
the brooms ready-made. Later, as we shall see, he "borrowed" with a
ruthlessness that was surpassed only by Alexandre Dumas. Let us say,
then, that The Kasidah is tesselated work done in Burton's usual way,
and not very coherently, with a liberal sprinkling of obsolete works. At
first it positively swarmed with them, but subsequently, by the advice
of a friend, a considerable number such as "wox" and "pight" was
removed. If the marquetry of The Kasidah compares but feebly with the
compendious splendours of FitzGerald's quatrains; and if the poem [333]
has undoubted wastes of sand, nevertheless, the diligent may here and
there pick up amber. But it is only fair to bear in mind that the Lay
is less a poem than an enchiridion, a sort of Emersonian guide to the
conduct of life rather than an exquisitely-presented summary of the
thoughts of an Eastern pessimist. FitzGerald's poem is an unbroken
lament. Burton, a more robust soul than the Woodbridge eremite, also has
his misgivings. He passes in review the great religious teachers, and
systems and comes to the conclusion that men make gods and Gods after
their own likeness and that conscience is a geographical accident; but
if, like FitzGerald, he is puzzled when he ponders the great questions
of life and afterlife, he finds comfort in the fact that probity and
charity are their own reward, that we have no need to be anxious about
the future, seeing that, in the words of Pope, "He can't be wrong, whose
life is in the right." He insists that self-cultivation, with due regard
for others, is the sole and sufficient object of human life, and he
regards the affections and the "divine gift of Pity" as man's highest
enjoyments. As in FitzGerald's poem there is talk of the False Dawn
or Wolf's Tail, "Thee and Me," Pot and Potter, and here and there are
couplets which are simply FitzGerald's quatrains paraphrased [334]--as,
for example, the one in which Heaven and Hell are declared to be mere
tools of "the Wily Fetisheer." [335] Like Omar Khayyam, Haji Abdu loses
patience with the "dizzied faiths" and their disputatious exponents;
like Omar Khayyam too, Haji Abdu is not averse from Jamshid's bowl, but
he is far less vinous than the old Persian.

Two of the couplets flash with auroral splendour, and of all the vast
amount of metrical wor