The island naturally possessed its characteristic speech. The dialect of Lesbos was strongly marked. It is altogether unsafe to specify at this distance of time the particular qualities of softness or sonority which belonged to Greek dialects; but, if one may venture where doubt must always be so great, it would not be unreasonable to speak of Lesbian Greek as perhaps the most “singable” of them all. In several ways it is peculiarly like Italian. The aspirate is gone, the double consonants are brought out with an Italian clarity unique in Greece, the vowels are firm and musical. And here we must remember that a local Greek dialect must never be looked upon as a provincial _patois_ simply because it is not Attic. Neither Attic nor any other one speech possessed a pre-eminence in Greece in the year 600 B.C. The poet of every little independent Grecian state was free to compose in his own idiom, with no more hesitation or self-consciousness than would have occurred to a Provençal troubadour, an early _trouvère_ of Normandy, or a Sicilian poet before the age of Dante. The half-doubts of Burns when writing his native Scots would find no sympathy in Sappho or Alcæus. No poetry that profoundly stirs the heart was ever written with effort in an alien speech. Burns perhaps had some reason to be tempted to write in English. The Lesbian singers had no temptation to write in anything but Lesbian. Sappho may indeed be called the Burns of Greece, but if her dialect, like his, was local, it was at the same time the genuine and recognised language of the most cultured men and women of her people.