This stanza is so foreign from the spirit of high excitation in which the preceding part of the ode is written, that Maffei suspected it had belonged to some other poem of Catullus; and Handius, in his _Observationes Criticæ_, conjectures that the fourth stanza, which Catullus translated from the original Greek, having been lost, and a chasm being thus left, some idle librarian or scholiast of the middle ages had interpolated these four lines of misplaced morality, that no gap might appear in his manuscript(492). It is not impossible, however, that this verse may have been intended to express the answer of the poet’s mistress. Many amatory poets have tried to imitate this celebrated ode; but most of them have failed of success. Boileau has also attempted this far-famed fragment; but although he has produced an elegant enough poem, he has not expressed the vehement passion of the Greek original so happily as Catullus. How different are the rapidity and emotion of the following stanza, “Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus Flamma dimanat, sonitu suopte Tintinant aures—gemina teguntur Lumina nocte,” from the languor of the corresponding lines of the French poet! “Une nuage confus se repand sur ma vue, Je n’entend plus, je tombe en de douces langueurs, Et passe, sans haleine, interdite, perdue; Un frisson me saisit—je tremble, je me meurs.” These lines give us little idea of that furious passion of which Longinus says the Greek ode expresses all the symptoms. Racine has been much more happy than Boileau in his imitation of Sappho. Phædra, in the celebrated French tragedy which bears the name of that victim of love, thus paints the effects of the passion with which she was struck at her first view of Hippolytus:— “Athènes me montra mon superbe ennemi: Je le vis, je rougis, je palis à sa vue— Un trouble s’eleva dans mon ame éperdue, Mes yeux ne voyoient plus, je ne pouvois parler; Je sentis tout mon cœur et transir et brûler(493).” On this passage Voltaire remarks, “Peut on mieux imiter Sappho? Ces vers, quoique imites, coulent de source; chaque mot trouble les ames sensibles, et les penetre; ce n’est point une amplification: c’est le chef d’œuvre de la nature et de l’art(494).” A translation by De Lille, which has a very close resemblance to that of Boileau, is inserted in the delightful chapter of the _Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis_, which treats of Lesbos and Sappho. Philips, it is well known, attempted a version of the lyric stanzas of Sappho, which was first printed with vast commendation in the 229th Number of the Spectator, where Addison has also remarked, “that several of our countrymen, and Dryden in particular, seem very often to have copied after this ode of Sappho, in their dramatic writings, and in their poems upon love.”