went with much reluctance to fulfil the order. Washington, after reading the message with great consideration, without speaking a word, gave her her discharge, together with a note containing a few words of advice, and some money. She afterwards married Benjamin Gannett, of Sharon, Massachusetts. She received a pension, with a grant of land, for her services as a revolutionary soldier.
SANDFORD, MRS.,
Wife of the Rev. John Sandford, wrote a little work much commended on its appearance—"Woman in her Social and Domestic Character." This was reprinted in Boston in 1832. At that time few works on the subject of woman's duties and influence had appeared since Mrs. More and the Rev. Mr. Bennet wrote their stiff treatises. Mrs. Sandford keeps religion constantly in view, and thus inculcates moral goodness as the cardinal quality of worth for the sex. So far, her work is excellent; but she, like most writers on this subject, falls into the grave error of making reason and physical power superior to moral goodness. She constantly describes woman as inferior to man. While such is the tone of British writers their works will do little for the cause of Christianity. That the Saviour's precepts are more generally and perfectly obeyed by women than by men no person will question; if to be a Christian And do good is the highest glory of humanity, above physical strength, which is held in common with animals, above mental power, which, without this moral goodness, is used in the service of devils, then woman's nature is the superior; and those who teach otherwise are really promoting the kingdom of darkness—the reign of licentiousness and infidelity.
SAPPHO,
A celebrated Greek poetess, was a native of Mitylene, in the Isle of Lesbos, and flourished about B. C. 610. She married Cercala, a rich inhabitant of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis; and it was not, probably, till after she became a widow that she rendered herself distinguished by her poetry. Her verses were chiefly of the lyric kind, and love was the general subject, which she treated with so much warmth, and with such beauty of poetical expression, as to have acquired the title of the "Tenth Muse." Her compositions were held in the highest esteem by her contemporaries, Roman as well as Greek, and no female name has risen higher in the catalogue of poets. Her morals have been as much depreciated, as her genius has been extolled. She is represented by Ovid as far from handsome; and as she was probably no longer young when she fell in love with the beautiful Phaon, his neglect is not surprising. Unable to bear her disappointment, she went to the famous precipice of Leucate, since popularly called the Lover's Leap, and throwing herself into the sea, terminated at once her life and her love.
Sappho formed an academy of females who excelled in music; and it was doubtless this academy which drew on her the hatred of the women of Mitylene. She is said to have been short in stature, and swarthy in her complexion. Ovid confirms this description in his Heroides, in the celebrated epistle from Sappho to
