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48 cerned with translations into English. Arnold was happily able to shake himself entirely free from the effect of the scandals which he so justly condemns, but, as we have seen, the earlier writers, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were too easily led astray in this particular. Donne’s works afford an example of how difficult or perhaps impossible it was for even great writers to escape the effects of such scandalous traditions. They were far too ready to accept these stories, and to use them in connection with Sappho as a peg on which to hang some gaudy product of their own licentious imaginations. Donne’s poem, published in 1633 and entitled “Sapho to Philaenis,” is an instance. It is as impossible to deny to Donne the possession of poetic instinct as it is to assume that he had any particular tendency to exploit the indecent, so we must explain such poems as this by his ignorance of Greek and of all that concerned Sappho, except the unpleasant tradition which her name connoted at the time when he wrote. Some modern writers have also been guilty of the same sort of thing.

An important article on Sappho appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” for July 1871, by T. W. Higginson. It occupies ten pages, and in it the writer gives as much general information of a biographical and critical nature as was available at the time. He repudiates the calumnies of the comic writers of later centuries, such as Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, and Timocles who by the way are