Every Persian scholar must, I suppose, have meditated at some time or other on the extraordinary disproportion between the vast number of Persian poets whose names are familiar to him, and whose lives are enshrined in the Biographies of ‘Awfí, Dawlatsháh, Taqiyyu'd-Dín Káshí, Luṭf ‘Alí Beg, and other tadhkira-writers, and the small number whose works are read, even in the East, save by the very curious or diligent student. So far as the West is concerned, it may be said, I think, that of only four, Firdawsí, Sa‘dí, ‘Umar Khayyám, and Ḥáfi, does any clear and definite idea exist amongst educated Europeans not specially interested in Oriental literature. Of these four, thanks primarily to Edward FitzGerald, ‘Umar Khayyám is certainly the most popular in the West, especially in Europe and America; though ‘Awfí, writing exactly a century after his death, totally ignores him, and Dawlatsháh only mentions him incidentally in the course of another biography; while even his personal friend and admirer, Niámí-i-‘Arúḍí of Samarqand, places him in his Chahár Maqála not in the section which he devotes to poets, but in that which deals with astronomers. Ḥáfi, accessible to non-Orientalists in England in at least three good metrical translations, those of Hermann Bicknell, Miss Gertrude Bell, and Mr. Walter Leaf, and in Germany in the complete versified translation of Rosenzweig-Schwannau, certainly comes next in point of popularity.