we are told, that the physician Erasistratus discovered that the sickness of Antiochus arose from his love for his mother-in-law Stratonice.*

Sappho taught amatory writing to the Greek poets, and amongst her scholars are reckoned the sad Simonides and that Ibycus of Rhegium, who, of all others, appeared to Cicero to be warmest in love.†

The ancients made this woman a heroine in their dramas and romances. The love of Anacreon and Sappho is merely a beautiful fiction, the credit of which is destroyed by chronology. Diphilus the comedian," says Bentley," in his Sappho introduced Archilochus and Hipponax as gallants to that lady, though the one was dead before she was born, and she dead before the other was born." Had it been practicable for Sappho to have been courted by Hipponax, she would have had a

* Plutarch, "Demetrius."

† Cicero, "Tuscul." IV, 33.

Bentley, "Dissertation on Phalaris."

p. 183. Lond. 1836.

Works 1,

lover, whose remarkable person is commemorated by Ælian in his chapter on thin men, where we are told that the poet was of small stature, and deformed, and very slender.*

* Elian, "Varia Historia," lib. x, c. 6.

ESOP.

THERE are certain great persons in history regarding whom the traditions of fable and poetry, and the assertions of plain falsehood, have triumphed in the vulgar belief of ages over the most authentic records and the most

complete evidence. That Homer was a beggar; that Belisarius became both blind and a beggar; that Shakspere had no classical learning; and that Æsop, the fabulist, was a dwarf, with a hump on his back, are at this moment historical facts with, perhaps, ninetynine out of a hundred who have heard of these illustrious men.

The name of Esop is amongst the most renowned that have come down from antiquity. His era is some time about five or six hundred years before Christ. He stands somewhere between Homer and the great age of Grecian literature. The story of his deformity is of comparatively modern origin, even if the broad assertion of Bentley, who holds that it was first sent forth to the world by Planudes, a Byzantine monk of the fourteenth century, should be found to be untenable.

Of Planudes, Bentley says, with characteristic politeness, "that idiot of a monk has given us a book which he calls "The Life of Æsop,' that perhaps cannot be matched in any language for ignorance and nonsense. It is somewhat curious to find Bentley resenting more warmly than he does all the other fictions in the monk's work the unfavourable representation which it gives of Æsop's person. "But of all his injuries to Æsop, that which can least be forgiven him, is making such a mon

* Bentley, "Dissertation upon the Fables of Æsop." Works, vol 11, p. 233.

VOL. I.

C

ster of him for ugliness; an abuse that has found credit so universally, that all the modern painters since the time of Planudes have drawn him in the worst shapes and features that fancy could invent. It was an old tradition amongst the Greeks that Æsop revived again and lived a second life. Should he revive once more and see the picture before the book that carries his name, could he think it drawn for himself or for the monkey, or some strange beast introduced in his fables?"

Since the time of Planudes, a thousand authorities have copied his description, and there is not a pictured edition of Æsop, or Phædrus, or Fontaine, which does not help to sanction and sanctify the belief. Yet the critical inquirer must reject the tale.

"What revela

tion," asks Bentley, "had this monk about Æsop's deformity? For he must learn it by dream and vision, and not by ordinary methods of knowledge. He lived about two thousand years after him; and in all that tract of time there's not one single author that has given the least hint that Æsop was ugly."