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Addifon quotes a paffage from Shakspeare fimilar to this epigram:

We Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Created with our needles both one flower,
Both warbling of one fong, both in one key;
Both on one famplar, fitting on one cushion;
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
As if our hands, our fides, voices, and minds,
Like to a double cherry, feeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,

Two lovely berries molded on one ftem;
Or with two feeming bodies, but one heart.
Midsummer Night's Dream,

EPIGRAM XVIII.

neral protector of learning; and therefore usually Ver. 1. The ancients efteemed Mercury the geplaced bis ftatue in their libraries, and in the porticoes before their public fchools and academies.

EPIGRAM XIX.

Addif

Nothing among the ancient Greeks and Romans was pficemed a greater act of piety, than to fight for the good of the community; and they, who This epigram, notwithstanding what Barnes have greatly fallen in fo righteous a caufe, are em- fays to the contrary, is thought not to be Ans balmed with immortal honours. Tyrtaus wrote creon's; the mention of Sophocles being too ra. fome table poems on martial vistne. The follow-pagnant to chronology, to admit is far geaying.

THE WORKS

F

SAPPH O.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK.

FRANCIS FAWKES, M. 4.

THE LIFE OF SAPPHO.

SAPPHO was a native of Mitylene in the island of Lebos. Who was her father is uncertain, there being no less than eight perfons who have contended for that honour; but it is univerfally acknowledged that Cleis was her mother. She flourished, according to Suidas, in the 42d Olympiad; according to Eufebius, in the 44th Olympiad, about 6c0 years before our Saviour Chrift. She was contemporary with Pittacus, the famous tyrant of Mitylene, and the two celebrated poets, Stelichorus and Alcæus. Barnes has endeavoured to prove, from the teftimonies of Chameleon and Hermefianax, that Anacreon was one of her lovers; but this amour has been generally esteemed too repugnant to chronology, to be admitted for any thing but a poetical fiction.

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She married one Cercolas, a man of great wealth and power in the island of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis. He leaving her a widow very young, fhe renounced all thoughts of a fecond marriage, but not the pleafares of love; not enduring to confine that paffion to one perfon, which, as the ancients tell us, was too violent in her to be reftrained even to one fex.

But no one feems to have been the object of her admiration fo much as the accomplished Phaon, a young man of Lefbos; who is faid to have been a kind of ferryman, and thence fabled to have carried Venus over the ftream in his boat, and to have received from her, as a reward, the favour of becoming the most beautiful man in the world. She fell defperately in love with him, and took a voyage into Sicily in purfuit of him, Le having withdrawn himself thither on purpofe to avoid her. It was in that iflard, and on this occafion, that the compofed her hymn to Venus.

Her poem was ineffectual for the procuring that happiness which she prayed for in it. Phaon was ftill obdurate, and Sappho was fo transported with the violence of her paffion, that the refolved to get rid of it at any rate.

There was a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in fecret, and afterwards to fling themfelves from the top of the precipice into the fea. For it was an efta

hed opinion, that all those who were taken up

alive, would immediately be cured of their former paflion. Sappho tried the remedy; but perished in the experiment. The original of this unaccountable humour is not known. Ovid reprefents Sappho as advised to undertake this ftrange pro. ject by the vifion of a fea-nymph, of which the fent the following account to the cruel Phaon:

Hic ego cum laffos, &c.

Here as I lay, and fwell'd with tears the flood, Before my fight a watʼry virgin ftood; She stood and cry'd, "O you that love in vain! « Fly hence and feck the fair Leucadian main: "There ftands a rock, from whofe impending "Steep

"Apollo's fane furveys the rolling deep;
"There injur'd lovers, leaping from above,
"Their flames extinguifh, aud forget to love.
"Hafte, Sappho, hafle, from high Leucadia throw
"Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps bey
"low!"

She fpoke, and vanish'd with the voice-l rife
And filent tears fall trickling from my eyes.
I go ye, nymphs, thofe rocks and feas to prove :
How much I fear, but, ah, how much I love!
I go, ye nymphs, where furious love infpires ;
Let female fears fubmit to female fires.
To rocks and feas I fly from Phaon's hate,
And hope from feas and rocks a milder fate.
Ye gentle gales, beneath my body blow,
And foftly lay me on the waves below!
And thou, kind love, my finking limbs fuftain,
Spread thy foft wings, and waft me o'er the
main,
[fane!
Nor let a lover's death the guiltlefs flood pro-.
Pope.

The Romans erected a moft noble ftatue of

porphyry to her memory: and the Mitylenians, to exprefs their fenfe of her worth, and the glory they received from her being born amongst them, paid her fovereign honours after her death, and coined money with her head for the imprefs.

from her own defcription of it in Ovid :
The best idea we can have of her perfon, is
Si mihi difficilis formam, &c.

To me what nature has in charms deny'd,
Is well by wit's more lafting charms fapply'd

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On the revival of learning, men of the most refined taste accounted the lofs of her writings ineftimable, and collected the facred relics with the utmost affiduity: though Mr Additon (in the Spectator, No. 223.) judiciously observes: "I do "not know, by the character that is given "of her works, whether it is not for the benefit "of mankind that they are loft. They were "filled with fuch betwitching tenderness and sapture, that it might have been dangerous to have "given them a reading."

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Voffius, in the third book of his Inftitutiones Poetice, fays, that none of the Greek poets ex

| celled Sappho in sweetness of verfe; and that the made Archilochus the model of her ftyle, but at the fame time took great care to foften and temper the severity of his expreffion.

Hoffman, in his Lexicon, fays, “Some authors "6 are of opinion, that the elegy which Ovid made "under the name of Sappho, and which is in"finitely fuperior to his other elegies, was all, or at least the most beautiful part of it, stolen " from the poems of the elegant Sappho."

66

She was the inventrefs of that kind of verfe which (from her name) is called the Sapphic. She wrote nine books of Odes, befides Elegies, Epigrams, lambics, Monodies, and other pieces; of which we have nothing remaining entire, but an Hymn to Venus, an Ode preferved by Longinus (which, however, the learned acknowledge to be imperfect), twa Epigrams, and fome other little Fragments. I fhall conclude my account of this celebrated lady in the words of Mr. Addison, taken from the above-mentioned Spec

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that the followed nature in all her thoughts, " without defcending to thofe little points, conceits, and turns of wit with which many of our "modern lyrics are fo miferably infected, Her "foul feems to have been made up of love and poetry: the felt the paffion in all its warmth, and defcribed it in all its fymptoms. She is "called by ancient authors the tenth mufe; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus the fun of "Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but fame"

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