he remarkable essay of Welcker, [1] from which all modern estimates of Sappho date, was first published in 1816, under the title, "Sappho vindicated from a prevailing Prejudice." It was a remarkable instance of the power of a single exhaustive investigation to change the verdict of scholars. Bishop Thirlwall, for instance, says of it: "The tenderness of Sappho, whose character has been rescued, by one of the happiest efforts of modern criticism, from the unmerited reproach under which it had labored for so many centuries, appears to have been no less pure than glowing." And Felton, who is usually not more inclined than becomes a man and a professor to put a high estimate on literary women, declares of her that "she has shared the fortunes of others of her sex, endowed like her with God's richest gifts of intellect and heart, who have been the victims of remorseless calumny for asserting the prerogatives of genius, and daring to compete with men in the struggle for fame and glory." Indeed, I know of no writer since Welcker who has seriously attempted to impugn his conclusions, except Colonel Mure, an Edinburgh advocate, whose onslaught upon Sappho is so vehement that Felton compares it to that of John Knox on Mary Stuart, and finds in it proof of a constitutional hostility between Scotch Presbyterians and handsome women.

But Mure's scholarship is not high, when tried by the German standard, whatever it may be according to the English or American. His book is also somewhat vitiated in this respect by being obviously written under a theory, namely, that love, as a theme for poetry, is a rather low and debasing thing; that the subordinate part it plays in Homer is one reason why Homer is great; and that the decline of literature began with lyric poetry. "A ready subjection," he says, "to the fascinations of the inferior order of their species can hardly be a solid basis of renown for kings or heroes." Such a critic could hardly be expected to look with favor upon one who not only chose an inferior order of themes, but had the temerity to belong to an inferior order herself.

Apart from this, I am unable to see that this writer brings forward anything to disturb the verdict of abler scholars. He does not indeed claim to produce any direct evidence of his proposition that Sappho was a corrupt woman, and her school at Lesbos a nursery of sins; but he seeks to show this indirectly, through a minute criticism of her writings. Into this he carries, I regret to say, an essential coarseness of mind, like that of Voltaire, which delights to torture the most innocent phrases till they yield a double meaning. He reads these graceful fragments as the sailors in some forecastle might read Juliet's soliloquies, or as a criminal lawyer reads in court the letters of some warm-hearted woman; the shame lying not in the words, but in the tongue. The manner in which he gloats over the scattered lines of a wedding song, for instance, weaving together the phrases and supplying the innuendoes, is enough to rule him out of the class of pure-minded men. But besides this quality of coarseness, he shows a serious want of candor. For though he admits that Sappho first introduced into literature (in her Epithalamia) a dramatic movement, yet he never gives her the benefit of this dramatic attitude except where it suits his own argument. It is as if one were to cite Browning into court and undertake to convict him, on his own confession, of sharing every mental condition he describes.

What, then, was this Lesbian school that assembled around Sappho? Mure pronounces it to have been a school of vice. The German professors see in it a school of science. Professor Felton thinks that it may have resembled the Courts of Love in the Middle Ages. But a more reasonable parallel, nearer home, must occur to the minds of those of us who remember Margaret Fuller and her classes. If Sappho, in addition to all that the American gave her pupils, undertook the duty of instruction in the most difficult music, the most complex metres, and the profoundest religious rites, then she had on her hands quite too much work to be exclusively a troubadour or a savante or a sinner. And if such ardent attachments as Margaret Fuller inspired among her own sex were habitually expressed by Sappho's maiden lovers, in the language of Lesbos instead of Boston, we can easily conceive of sentimental ardors which Attic comedians would find ludicrous and Scotch advocates nothing less than a scandal.

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¹ "Sappho von cinem herrachenden Vorurtheil befreit," Welcker, Kleine Schriften, II. 8o. See also his "Sappho," a review of Neue's edition of her works, first published in 1828 (K. S., I. ixo), and "Sappho und Phaon," published in 1863, a review of Mure and Theodor Kock (K. S., V. 228).