John Lyly made Sappho an allegorical image of the Virgin Queen: “I will ever be virgin,” says Sappho. The play, _Sapho and Phao_, was produced in 1584 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. Lyly makes Sappho a princess of Syracuse and takes many liberties with the historical Sappho. Lyly’s Sappho resembles the Queen, and Phao is supposed to be the Duke of Leicester, but in such an allegory all reference to the Leucadian Leap has to be omitted, and there are no echoes of Sappho’s own fragments. When Phaon comes, Sappho soliloquizes: “Wilt thou open thy love? Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die before his face; then this shall be written on thy tomb, that though thy love were greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine honour was such as love could not violate.” Aphrodite interrupts their love and Phaon says: “This shall be my resolution, where-ever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.... My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho’s good.” Even Robert Burton in that famous storehouse of quotations, his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1621), does not know Sappho as a poetess, and refers only to the _Leucata Petra_: “Here leaped down that Lesbian Sappho for Phaon on whom she miserably doted, hoping thus to ease herself and to be freed of her love pangs.” The first English translation of Sappho’s second ode (1652), quoted by Edwin Cox, is John Hall’s version in his translation of the _Treatise an the Sublime_. He does not mention Sidney, and Addison did not know even Hall’s translation or that of Pulteney, for he says that the versions by Ambrose Philips in 1711 were the first. In 1675 Edward Phillips in his _Theatrum Poetarum_ devoted a chapter to Ancient Poetesses and Sappho. He knew the tradition of a second Sappho, but quoted no fragments. In 1680 Pulteney, who had a knowledge of small Latin and less Greek, gave a filtered translation from the French of the _Treatise on the Sublime_ and the second Sapphic ode. In 1695 appeared another translation by an unknown author, but it was not till 1711 that any detailed study of Sappho began. In that year, in the Spectator (nos. 223, 229, and 233), Joseph Addison discussed Sappho at length. Even then we have only the namby-pamby verses of Ambrose Philips, so overpraised by Addison. Soon followed translations by Herbert in 1713, in his edition of Petronius (pp. 325-328); and in 1719, by Green. In 1735 John Addison published the works of Anacreon with Sappho added, in which the _Loeb Classical Library_ idea of putting the Greek text on one page and the translation on the opposite page was anticipated. Philips’ version of the Aphrodite hymn was forty-two lines long, but Addison gives one of his own in twenty-eight lines, which is the number in the original Greek. His own rendering is as good as that of Philips, which perhaps is damning it with faint praise.