Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/35

Rh 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.

Though her poems in the original were known to a few Englishmen in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, this knowledge appears to have been superficial with a large proportion of it infected with the Ovidian version of the alleged episode in connection with Phaon, for references to this and to the Leucadian rock legend, with a few doubtful biographical details from late classical sources comprise all that we have in English up to, as we shall see later, the appearance of John Hall’s translation of Longinus in 1652. There was apparently no attempt to translate the magnificent Hymn to Aphrodite, although nearly every classical writer of anything like equal importance had some attention during this period. Much that was Greek we must, however, remember came to England in French or Latin versions frequently tinctured with the personal views of the translators into those languages. It is a fact worth noting that the Sapphic metre attracted certain poets and compilers soon after it was known in England, but the first attempts to use it in our language were not in the nature of translations, but of original compositions.

Apparently the first attempt to use the Sapphic metre in