Calligraphy was one of William Morris's many passions, and between 1870 and 1875 he began no fewer than twenty-one manuscript books, many of which he also illuminated or planned to have decorated by Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray (see cat. no. 66). One of the first was A Book of Verse (National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), completed in August 1870 as a gift for Georgiana Burne-Jones. 1 Georgie was also the recipient in 1872 of the first of four versions of the recent translation of the Rubbiyat by the twelfth-century poet Omar Khayyam (British Library, London), illustrated with Morris's own tiny pictorial scenes among a profusion of naturalistic decoration. 2 The present manuscript, which has no title page, was given by Morris to Burne-Jones, who made a gift of it to Frances Graham, the daughter of his patron William Graham. The Rubaiyat, published anonymously in 1859, at first attracted little attention but found enthusiastic admirers in Rossetti and Swinburne, who gave Burne-Jones a copy of the first edition during his convalescence in the winter of 1861. 3 Burne-Jones recommended it in 1863 to Ruskin, who was so taken with the work as to leave a letter to be forwarded "To the Translator of Omar Khayyam," declaring, "I never did — till this day — read anything so glorious, to my mind, as this poem." Again through Burne-Jones, Charles Eliot Norton showed great interest, and it was he who finally forwarded Ruskin's note to JEdward FitzGerald (1809-1883) in 1873, hav- ing discovered from Thomas Carlyle the identity of the trans- lator. 4 The poem remained one of Burne-Jones's favorites, and although he had little sympathy for the Islamic world, in let- ters he expressed delight in its "splendid blasphemies." 5 Subsequently he must have met FitzGerald, as a crayon por- trait of the translator was shown at the New Gallery's Burne- Jones memorial exhibition of 1898-99. 6 All but one of Burne-Jones s illustrations depict a male and a female figure in romantic settings, three of them moonlit. The third (shown here) reproduces the composition of Love among the Ruins (private collection), a watercolour of 1870 which was one of only two works exhibited in the pre- Grosvenor Gallery years, at the Dudley Gallery in 1873 (along with The Hesperides [1870-73; Kunsthalle, Hamburg]). This was later shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, but suffered severe damage when carelessly washed with egg white by a photographer's assistant in 1893. A large replica in oil (Wightwick Manor, The National Trust) was undertaken immediately, and exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894. 7 The image takes its title from Robert Browning's poem of the same name (from Men and Women y 1855), but is equally suitable to the dolorous mood of the Rubbiyat. 1. Victoria and Albert Museum 1996, no. N.5. 2. Ibid., no. N.8. 3. Memorials, vol. 1, pp. 234-35; according to Georgie Burne-Jones, the same copy was used by Morris in transcribing the poem. 4. See John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby, eds., The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton (Cambridge, 1987), p. 147 n. 1. 5. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 135; Burne-Jones thought FitzGerald's to have been "a grey life, but very lovable . . . but I think Omar Khayyam is an immor- tal work, and he shall live by that" (Horner 1933, p. 115). 6. New Gallery 1898-99, no. 199 (lent by Mrs. W.J. FitzGerald). 7. See Hartnoll 1988, p. 48.