PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.

SAPPHO.

OF one of the most celebrated women of antiquity, the poetess Sappho, living about six centuries before the Christian era, we have a personal description handed down, in all probability, from her own time, if not indeed. through writings of her own, now lost. This description is familiar to most readers from the epistle which Ovid, in the name of Sappho, has inscribed to Phaon, the object of her unrequited and fatal love. In this epistle, Sappho is made to tell us that nature had denied her beauty but had gifted her with genius; that her

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fame was sung throughout the whole world, and that her countryman Alcæus, though his was a loftier strain, was not more celebrated than she was. She tells Phaon that she is of short stature and of a dark complexion; but she reminds him that Andromeda (whom Grecian fable makes the daughter of a king of Ethiopia), with the tawny colour of her country, had pleased the heroic Perseus.

When a woman otherwise famous, and living at a distant date, is spoken of, if there be no specific information respecting her person, tradition becomes gallant, and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, gifts her with beauty in abundance. It is this consideration which gives weight to the belief that, in drawing her picture more than five hundred years after Sappho had ceased to sing, Ovid did not indulge in any wayward fancy of his own, rich and original as his fancy was beyond that of any other of the Roman poets, but embodied a well-founded and universallyreceived tradition, if he even did not make use of authentic historical information extant in his

time. The language which Ovid puts into her mouth is so specific as to give countenance to the belief entertained by some writers that the finest parts of this epistle, one of the best in the collection, were taken from writings of Sappho, which were in the poet's hands.

To the evidence furnished by Ovid, which is very strong, that Sappho could not boast of personal beauty, some have added a testimony which is certainly very weak. There are two verses preserved amongst the fragments of Sappho, in which she expresses her preference of the beauty of the mind to the beauty of the person.* The argument drawn from these verses-that Sappho undervalued what she did not possess-is, I think, perfectly worthless. In all ages of the world, both writers and speakers have, often no doubt hypocritically enough, expressed the very decided preference which they felt for moral and intellectual over personal beauty; and this preference, in truth, is one of the most completely worn-out of com

*Sappho, "Fragmenta et Elogia." Cura Jo. Christiani Wolfii, p. 72. Hamburg, 1733.