and to ridicule the habits of a well-known citizen, he would not venture
to put before the people a representation in which there was not a grain
of truth.

But Sappho had been dead for two hundred years: the Athenian populace
knew little of her except that she had been great and that she had been
unhappy; and the descendants of the men who had thronged the theatre to
see the Oedipus of Sophokles, sickening with that strange disease which
makes the soul crave to batten on the fruits that are its poison, found
a rare feast furnished forth in the imaginary history of the one great
woman of their race.

The centuries went on, and Sappho came before the tribunal of the early
Christian Church.

The chief witnesses against her were these same comic poets, who were
themselves prisoners at the bar; and her judges, with the ruthless
impartiality of undiscriminating zeal, condemned the whole of her works,
as well as those of her accusers, to be destroyed in the flames.

Thus her works have almost totally perished: the fragments that are
extant give us only the faintest hints of the grace and sweetness that
we have for ever lost.

The mode of the preservation of these remains is half-pathetic,
half-grotesque. We have one complete poem and a considerable portion of
another; the rest are the merest fragments--now two or three lines, now
two or three words, often unintelligible without their context. We have
imitations and translations by Catullus and by Horace; but even Catullus
has conspicuously failed to reproduce her. As Mr. Swinburne has candidly