Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/14

 different things, the Soul, Body, Speech, Looks, etc., as if they had been so many distinct persons just expiring?” The translation of the commentary of Longinus then proceeds. It is interesting to compare Pulteney’s version of this second important Sapphic fragment, with the work of Hall areadyalready [sic] described. As it is not improbable that Pulteney knew no Greek, and as his version is filtered through the French, it is not remarkable that in this process the Sapphic metre should have disappeared and that considerable divergencies from the original should have developed. There was a Third Translation of Longinus by an unknown author, published at Oxford in 1695.

The “Athenian Mercury,” a curious seventeenth century journal, which ran for a few years from 1691 to 1697 contains in the issue for January 12, 1691, in No. 13, Question 8, an interesting reference to Sappho, but no translation or quotation from her poems. Question 8 is “whether Sappho or Mrs. Behn were the better poetess.” The reply to this query is somewhat rambling, but part of it is worth repeating, if only for its amusing qualities.

It is stated “That Sappho writ too little and Mrs. Behn too much, for us to give ’em any just or equal character” and further, “but yet one Fragment consisting of but a few lines which we have of Sappho’s carries something in it so soft, luscious and charming even in the sound of the words, that Catullus himself who has endeavoured somewhat like ’em in Latin comes infinitely short of ’em, and so have all the rest who have writ their own thoughts on that subject,—for which we cou’d wish that Mrs. Behn herself had translated ’em before she went to Elysium to meet her.” The italics are in the original and the writer thus shows, as he apparently means the italics to indicate emphasis, that he had a real appreciation for the melodious qualities of the Hymn to Aphrodite, obviously the poem in his mind, although his seventeenth century imagination did not permit him sufficiently to differentiate between the studied salaciousness of Mrs. Behn