THE INFLUENCE OF OMAR KHAYYAM. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE
"SPECTATOR."] SIR,—In your interesting article in the Spectator of Jane 10th to which my paper in the National Review about Omar Khayyam serves as a text, you say : " Mr. Bernard Holland
thinks, we imagine, that all Asiatic ideas will, like those of Omar Khayyam, produce mischief." Will you allow me to explain that I think that much of the thought which flows from the East is of the highest value to us ? At the end of my article I suggest that a main result of our occupation of India may be "the restoration under influences flowing from the East of the true and essential meaning of our own religion."
It may some day be said that India capta ferum victorem cepit, &c. I do not so much think that Omar Khayyam is
productive of " mischief " as that the recent popularity of Fitzgerald's long obscure version is one of many signs that in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world the old conception of religion has lately largely lost its hold, and has not yet been replaced by the older yet newer.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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