‘_Hold my coat_,’ he cries, ‘_and I will knock out his eye. I’ve got two right hands, and I never miss when I throw_.’ On the subject of women he does not say so much as the other two, for the range of his thought is almost confined to carnal delights. A fair sample of his style is this fragment: ‘_There are only two days in your life that your wife gives you pleasure: the day you marry her and the day you bury her_.’ This insistence on the physical side of love runs through all the elegiac and lyric poetry of the age. Love to Mimnermus is a thing of secret kisses, of chambering and wantonness, and it depends alone on physical attractions. A young man is happy, for he is handsome and desirable; an old man is wretched, to women an object of scorn. The satiety that comes from excess of sensual pleasure is the main cause of the melancholy pessimism that broods over much of Ionian literature. Of Alcæus and his Lycus, Anacreon and his Bathyllus, Theognis and Cyrnus, it is unnecessary now to speak, but it is difficult to believe such amiable apologists as Mr. Benecke when they try to show that a fine idealism was the inspiration of these relationships. Neither the character of the men’s writings nor that of their time and country give much ground for such confidence, and if we seek the purity of love’s passion we must turn to Sappho. Among all the foulness of her time Sappho shines out like a star. No loss in literature is so lamentable as the loss of the nine books of her poems that the Alexandrian library possessed; no treasure in literature is quite so precious as the fragments that various chances have preserved for us. And, luckily, the number of those fragments is still increasing, as will be seen by a comparison of the two best studies of Sappho in recent years, the exquisite collection of translations issued by Mr. Wharton in 1886, and the brilliant monograph on the new fragments by Mr. J. M. Edmonds in 1912. Even since that date fresh poems have come to light, and we do not know what Egypt may have yet in store. In all the fragments, new or old, there is an indefinable quality of personal feeling. Sappho, it has been said, has left us only a fragment of her work, but it is a fragment of her soul. Her friend and rival, Alcæus, is a great poet, but he lacks the fiery intensity of her inspiration, which gives life even to the briefest phrase that some grammarian has quoted for a rare word. Take the lines that Rossetti adapted: Like the sweet apple which reddens upon topmost bough, A-top on the topmost twig—which the pluckers forget somehow, Forget it not—nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now. Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found, Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound, Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground. Or, again, this other: