Books: Translator of the Rubaiyat

THE LIFE OF EDWARD FITZGERALD —Alfred McKinley Terhune—Yale ($5).

In London one day in 1861 Poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his great friend, Poet Algernon Swinburne, rummaging through the penny book box at Bookseller Quaritch's, made a sensational "find" — the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rendered into English by an anonymous translator. "Next day," Swinburne reported crossly, "when we returned for more [copies], the price was raised to the iniquitous and exorbitant sum of twopence. You should have heard . . . the . . . impressive severity of Gabriel's humorous expostulations with [Mr. Quaritch], on behalf of a defrauded if limited...