hymn in Sapphic metre, but there is no reference to the actual poetry of Sappho. The imitation is rather clumsy and has a somewhat sanctimonious ring about it. Again, in 1614 there was published a tract of sixteen leaves entitled, “The Martyrdom of Saint George of Cappadocia,” etc. It contains two dedications, the second of which is signed “Tristram White.” There is at the end a page devoted to what the author calls “Sapphicks,” which resemble the real poetry of Sappho only in having the same number of syllables to the line. There is nothing of the true Sappho in the production, and obviously no appreciation of the greatness of her poetic genius. Ben Jonson in “The Sad Shepherd,” Act II, Scene VI, used the expression, “the dear good Angel of the spring, the nightingale,” which is decidedly reminiscent of Sappho’s Ἤρος ἄγγελος ἰμερόφωνος ἀήδων, with which it is likely that such a good classical scholar as Jonson was familiar. Although a little later in the century the cultivated and learned Thomas Stanley translated the works of Anacreon and other Greek writers, Sappho either escaped his notice or he did not consider the fragments of sufficient importance to put into English, for no reference to them or their author appears in his volume privately printed in sections in 1650 and 1651, and re-issued by a bookseller in 1652 as a book for public circulation.
In Burton’s immortal “Anatomy of Melancholy,” first published in 1621, again in 1624, and in 1628 for the first
