Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/8

 peculiarity. During the past few years the Egypt Exploration Fund has sent indefatigable workers to the Delta of the Nile, and among other treasure trove there has been a certain number of fairly satisfactory fragments from second and third century papyri of Sappho's works. These recovered fragments have been deciphered, translated, and from time to time published.

However, the history of her writings as far as translations into English is concerned, only begins in the seventeenth century, although before the middle of that century there was a considerable number of references of varying length and importance scattered through English books, chiefly on historical and poetical subjects. Although few of these early references to the poetess have anything to do with actual translation of the fragments, their character and occurrence have a certain interest and a bibliographical relationship with the later attempts at translation into English. Such references also serve as an indication of the mental attitude of writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries towards Sappho, and from them we acquire the impression, that there was a gradual growth in appreciation and comprehension as the eighteenth century loomed into view, though this appreciation and comprehension were often clouded by the inability of these writers, owing to their imperfect knowledge and the prepossessions of their intellectual environment, to shake themselves free from the effects of the scandals launched by the later Greek comic writers, who were undoubtedly writing down to their audiences in many of the comedies which they produced. It is to be hoped that some interest attaches to the tracing of references to Sappho in English books of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in addition to the interest of the translations of her writings, in the narrower bibliographical sense. Biographical references and translations are so intimately associated in her case that they may be satisfactorily discussed together. Though her poems in the original were known to a few Englishmen