In Lesbos, as in every part of Greece, there were abundant demands upon musician and poet. Every occasion of worship, festivity, and grief required its song. The gods were hymned by groups at their altars and by white-robed maidens in processions; at weddings the hymeneal chorus was chanted along the street, and the epithalamion before the doors of the bridal home; at every banquet were sung lively catches and jocund songs of Bacchus; every season--spring, summer, harvest--had its popular ditty, exultant or pathetic; almost every occupation, of herdsman, boatman, gardener, was beguiled with melody; at the coming of the first swallow, as on the old English Mayday, the children sang the “swallow-song” from house to house. And let it be remembered that the Greeks had none of our modern tolerance for a song of which the words were nought and the tune everything. To them the thought, the sentiment, was first; the melody was simply its proper vehicle. Italian opera, when not a word is intelligible, would have seemed to them a strange anomaly. To them _mousikê_ was the “art of the Muses,” and this meant literature no less than minstrelsy. The poet, unless, like Burns, he wrote his verses to existing tunes, was his own composer. In either case he was poet first and foremost. Now for generations the songs for special purposes had been shaping themselves on special lines. To use a phrase of Aristotle, experience had found out the right species to fit the case. There were sundry recognised stanzas and metres for a processional, a hymeneal, or a dirge. In most cases, therefore, the task of a new poet was to write new words; the melody would, as in the case of Burns, almost find itself. Nevertheless the complete poet could not dispense with an elaborate training in music. To invent beautiful variations of existing tunes was part of his glory; he must at least write words which should sing themselves to the melody he selected. “Melodies” is the word, for the Greeks knew practically nothing of harmonies. Their songs were sung in unison, or simply with an octave interval when men sang with women or with boys. The accompanying instrument was generally the lyre, or one of many stringed instruments akin thereto; sometimes it was the so-called flute, which was in truth a clarinet. Whatever their musical deficiencies, it has been maintained by competent authorities that in nicety of ear for pitch and time the training of the Greeks incomparably surpassed the modern. Be that as it may, it must never be left out of sight that, when a Lesbian wrote a song, it was in the first place as perfect a poem as he could create, and in the second it was meant to be sung, not merely to be read. Shelley’s _Ode to a Skylark_ is consummate literature. Yet we may doubt if it could ever be sung, and assuredly it was not written to that end. On the other hand, the songs of Moore are often but sickly stuff to read, but they