lend themselves perfectly to those touching Irish airs, to which, by the way, the Lesbians seem to have been akin in a peculiar tone of plaintiveness. A Greek lyric aimed at combining the literary _mousikê_ of Shelley’s _Ode_ with the songful _mousikê_ of Moore. It is in the perfection of this combination that Sappho excels all women who have ever written verse. Where song was for generations so abundant, it follows that there was floating about among the people many an old ballad or favourite ditty whose author had been long forgotten. Numbers of these _Volkslieder_, or snatches of them, lay, sometimes with consciousness and sometimes unrealised, in the memory of every child of Lesbos. The artistic poet did not scorn them; he feared no charge of plagiarism if he adopted and adapted them; he often acted as Burns acted with the ballads of Scotland; he took them, gave them that marvellous and inexplicable touch of finality which only genius can impart, and so made them his for ever. This also did Sappho do, and her verses, when she deals with well-worn themes, are beyond question often fed with the hints of older nameless songsters. There is one department of lyric verse in which Lesbos stood supreme, and Sappho supreme in Lesbos. It is the poetry, not of religion or marriage, of the banquet or the seasons, but of personal emotion; the verse of the “lyric cry,” which tells of the writer’s own passion, its waves of joy and sorrow, love and hate. It is the monody, the verse sung, not by a gathered company, but from the one overflowing heart, the song best represented at Rome by Catullus, and in modern times by Burns or Heine. For most of her poems in this kind there is no reason to suppose that Sappho relied upon any promptings but those of her own soul. She took the floating rhythms of the ballads, modified them, and into their mould she poured verse which, as George Sand said of her own writings, came from “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought.” And here at length we come to the poetess herself. Into this land, devoted to poetry, to music, to flowers, and so regardful of loveliness that a public “prize of beauty” was annually competed for in the temple of Hera, was Sappho--or Psappha, as she apparently called herself--born in the latter part of the seventh century before Christ. Our ancient authorities are sufficiently in agreement as to her date, and we may lay it down that she was in her prime about the year 600 B.C., or nearly a hundred and fifty years before that great period of Athenian literary culture which is represented by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The ascertainable facts of her career are miserably few, and concerning those matters which are in debate as to her life and character the present exponent must be permitted to express simply his own views, premising that they have been formed with all due and deliberate care.