y mind to
it, so as to sit comparatively, if ignobly, easy on that score.
Sometimes I envy those who are so old that the Curtain will probably
fall on them before it does on their Country. If one could save the
Race, what a Cause it would be! not for one's own glory as a member of
it, nor even for its glory as a Nation: but because it is the only
spot in Europe where Freedom keeps her place. Had I Alfred's voice, I
would not have mumbled for years over In Memoriam and The Princess,
but sung such strains as would have revived the [Greek text] to guard
the territory they had won."

The curtain has fallen twelve years now on FitzGerald,--it is fifty-four
years since he wrote those words: God send their dark forebodings may
prove false! But they clouded his life, and were partly the cause why,
Ajax-like, he loitered in his tent.

His thoughts on religion he kept to himself. A letter of June 1885 from
the late Master of Trinity to my father opens thus:--

"MY DEAR ARCHDEACON,--I ought to have thanked you ere this for your
letter, and the enclosed hymn, which we much admire, and cannot but be
touched by. {76} The more perhaps as our dear dead friend seems to
have felt its pathos. I have more to repent of than he had. Two of
the purest-living men among my intimates, FitzGerald and Spedding,
were prisoners in Doubting Castle all their lives, or at least the
last half of them. This is to me a great problem,--not to be solved
by the ordinary expedients, nor on this side the Veil, I think."

A former rector of Woodbridge, now many years dead, once called on
FitzGerald to express his regret that he never saw him at church. "Sir,"
said FitzGerald, "you might have conceived that a man has not come to my
years of life without thinking much of these things. I believe I may say
that I have reflected on them fully as much as yourself. You need not
repeat this visit." Certain it is that FitzGerald's was a most reverent
mind, and I know that the text on his grave was of his own choosing--"It
is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves." I know, too, that
sometimes he would sit and listen in a church porch while service was
going on, and slip away unperceived before the people came out. Still,
it seems to me beyond question that his version of the 'Rubaiyat' is an
utterance of his soul's deepest doubts, and that hereafter it will come
to be recognised as the highest expre