Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/786

772 to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea. For it was an established opinion, that all those who were taken up alive, would immediately be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the experiment, but perished in the attempt. Some write that she was the inventress of this custom; but Strabo tells us, that those who understood antiquity better, have reported, that one Cephalus first made the desperate descent from that fatal precipice, called the Lovers Leap.

The Romans erected a most noble statue of porphyry to her memory; and the Mitylenians, to express their sense of her worth, and the glory they received from her being born amongst them, paid her sovereign honours after her death, and coined money with her head as the impress.

The best idea we can have of her person, is from her own description of it in Ovid, who is supposed to have borrowed the most beautiful thoughts in this epistle, confessedly far superior to his others, from works of her's no longer extant.

To give the English reader a true notion what opinion the ancients entertained of her works would be to collect volumes in her praise.

On the revival of learning, men of the most refined taste accounted the loss of her writings inestimable, and collected the relics with the utmost ;: [sic]