As is well known, the authors of the earlier Persian anthologies do not give specimens of Omar Khayyam's poetry. In fact, they did not regard him as a poet, but as a ḥakīm, or philosopher, who occasionally wrote verses, and perhaps this view is more correct than the ordinary European one, and the estimate which Omar himself would have made. Poetry with him was the amusement of his leisure hours, and we might style his quatrains, in the words used by Palgrave about Bacon's stanzas, as “a fine example of a peculiar class of poetry—that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little.” Such intermittent springs of poetry are not much appreciated by Orientals, who like quantity as well as quality. In speaking of a poet, they are generally careful to tell us how many thousand couplets he wrote. They admire Firdusi perhaps more for his having written 50,000 couplets—exclusive of his Joseph and Zulaika—than for his really fine passages, though it must be admitted that they seldom read him through, and practically only know him in extracts. As Professor Cowell has remarked in his excellent notice of Omar, which well deserves reprinting, “Every other poet of Persia has written too much—even her noblest sons of genius weary with their prolixity.