Sappho, in the portrait of her character jointly exhibited in her own works and in the notices of her more candid and intelligent countrymen, appears as a woman of a generous disposition, affectionate heart, and independent spirit, unless when brought under the sway of those tender passions, which lorded over every other influence in her bosom. Of a naturally ardent and excitable temperament, she seems from her earliest years to have been habituated to the enjoyments rather than to the duties, much less the restraints, of Greek female life. Her chief or early occupations were the exercise and display of her brilliant poetical talents and elegant accomplishments; and her voluptuous habits are testified by almost every extant fragment of her poems. Her susceptibility to the passion of love formed, above all, the dominant feature of her life, her character, and her muse. Her indulgence, however, of this, as of every other appetite, sensual or intellectual, while setting at nought all moral restraints, was marked by her own peculiar refinement of taste, exclusive of every approach to low excess or profligacy. In the portrait presented to us by the popular authorities of the present day, all the less favourable features of the above sketch are effaced; while the colouring of the remainder has been heightened to a dazzling extreme of beauty and brilliancy, exhibiting a model of perfection, physical and moral, such as was never probably exemplified in woman, and least of all in the prioress of an association of votaries of Venus and the Muses, in one of the most voluptuous states of Greece. The following is the summary of her various excellences, given by one of the popular organs of this amiable but fallacious theory: "In Sappho, a warm and profound sensibility, virgin purity, feminine softness, and delicacy of sentiment and feeling, were combined with the native probity and simplicity of the AEolian character; and, although endued with a fine perception of the beautiful and brilliant, she preferred genuine conscious rectitude to every other source of human enjoyment." ASPASIA OF PERICLES. [B.C. 470.] GROTE.