'Umar Khayyam. By Masud All Varesi. (Kegan Paul. 10s. 6d.
net).—Mr. Varesi, who is the Assistant Director of Public, Instruction in Bhopal,-has written an elaborate essay on Omar's life and poetry. Omar is said to have been born at Nishapur in 1016, so that he was 107 when he died there in 1123. His contemporaries knew him as a mathematician and astronomer ; his poems were the pastime of his leisure. Mr. Varesi admits that Omar's liberal views distressed the orthodox of his own day. Nevertheless, he asks us to believe that the praise of wine sad women must all be construed in a mystical sense, as an exposition of the Sufi philosophy. Mr. Varesi works out this theory in detail and gives literal translations of many of the quatrains. It is clear that Edward FitzGerald in his Rubaiyat transposed, as it were, the Persian airs into an English key. Omar literally rendered is not the Omar that we know through FitzGerald.
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