Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/787

Rh : though Mr. Addison (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 lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them the reading."

Vossius says that none of the Greek poets excelled Sappho in sweetness of versification, that she made Archilochus the model of her style, but at the same time took great care to soften and temper the severity of his expression. What remains to us of Sappho carries in it something so sweet, luxuriant, and charming, even in the sound of the words, that Catullus himself, who has attempted an imitation of them in Latin, falls infinitely short; and so have all the other poets, who have delivered their own ideas upon this subject.

She was the inventress of that kind of verse which from her name, is called the Sapphic. She wrote nine books of odes, besides elegies, epigrams, iambics, monodies, and other pieces; of which we have nothing remaining entire, but an hymn to Venus, an ode preserved by Longinus, which, however, the learned acknowledge to be imperfect, two epigrams, and some other little fragments; in one of which, like other great people, she promised herself immortality. I shall conclude my account of this celebrated lady in the words of Mr. Addison:

"Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with the extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those