Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/16

 He repeats the legend connecting her with Phaon, and gives a circumstantial repetition of the Leucadian rock story. In the first-mentioned number of the “Spectator,” he introduces a translation by Ambrose Philips, of what he calls the “Ode.” Addison professed to believe that this translation had “all the ease and spirit of an original,” and altogether praised it much more highly than we should feel inclined to do now. The translation consists of seven six-line verses in rhyming couplets, but the mellifluous cadence of the Sapphic metre is entirely lost in an eighteenth century jingle. The rendering itself is very free, and has suffered by thus diverging from the original. Addison gives also a translation of the ode preserved by Longinus, which has the same general characteristics as the first production, and is also from the pen of Philips. We may share Addison’s feeling here expressed that he “cannot but wonder that these two finished pieces have never been attempted before by any of our countrymen,” but part of our feeling is also astonishment that he should have been unaware of Hall’s and Pulteney’s two efforts. At the time when this was written no other fragments of Sappho’s writings of any importance were known, but Addison and Philips seem to have stimulated an interest in her poetry for there were soon other attempts with these two important poems, and also with a few other fragments. The Sapphic metre, however, seems to have been beyond the taste or comprehension of these eighteenth-century mediocrities, for so we may call them when we are comparing their efforts with the perfection of the Hymn to Aphrodite, which reaches a height to which they could not rise.

The attitude of the eighteenth century towards Sappho is very well shown by the inclusion, among other translations, of this Hymn in English from the pen of Mr. Herbert in the 1713–1714 edition of the translation of Petronius Arbiter, a writer studied by the few for his historical and literary interest and by a larger number for other reasons. This book, an octavo, contains in