enthusiastic partiality, who pretend that it was a peculiar indulgence of Heaven which stole him from the world by this easy and characteristic death, we cannot help admiring that his fate should be so emblematic of his disposition. Cælius Calcagninus alludes to this catastrophe in the following epitaph on our poet: * Then, hallow'd sage, those lips which pour'd along The sweetest lapses of the cygnet's song, lib. ii. cap. 15. It must be confessed that Lucian, who tells us that Sophocles was choked by a grape-stone, in the very same treatise mentions the longevity of Anacreon, and yet is silent on the manner of his death. Could he have been ignorant of such a remarkable coincidence, or, knowing, could he have neglected to remark it? See Regnier's introduction to his Anacreon. * At te, sancte senex, acinus sub tartara misit; Vos, hedera, tumulum, tumulum vos cingite lauri A grape has clos'd for ever! Here let the ivy kiss the poet's tomb, Here let the rose he lov'd with laurels bloom, In bands that ne'er shall sever! But far be thou, oh! far, unholy vine, By whom the favourite minstrel of the Nine Thy God himself now blushes to confess, There can scarcely be imagined a more delightful theme for the warmest speculations of fancy to wanton upon, than the idea of an intercourse between Anacreon and Sappho. At vitis procul hinc, procal hinc odiosa facessat, Cælius Calcagninus has translated or imitated the epi. grams is Thy Mupwvos Buy, which are given under the name of Anacreon. I could wish to believe that they were contemporary: any thought of an interchange between hearts so congenial in warmth of passion and delicacy of genius, gives such play to the imagination, that the mind loves to indulge in it; but the vision dissolves before historical truth; and Chamæleon and Hermesianax, who are the source of the supposition, are considered as having merely indulged in a poetical anachronism*. To infer the moral dispositions of a poet * Barnes is convinced of the synchronisin of Anacreon and Sappho; but very gratuitously. In citing his authorities, it is strange that he neglected the line which Fulvius Ursinus has quoted, as of Anacreon, among the testimonies to Sappho : Ειμι λαβων εισαρας Σαπφω παρθενον άδύφωνον. Fabricius thinks that they might have been cotemporary, but considers their amour as a tale of imagination. Vossius rejects the idea entirely: as also Olaus Borrichius, &c. &c. from the tone of sentiment which pervades his works, is sometimes a very fallacious analogy : but the soul of Anacreon speaks so unequivocally through his odes, that we may consult them as the faithful mirrors of his heart*. * An Italian poet, in some verses on Belleau's translation of Anacreon, pretends to imagine that our bard did not feel as he wrote. Lyæum, Venerem, Cupidinemque To Love and Bacchus ever young, Nor fill'd his bowl to Bacchus higher. : We find him there the elegant voluptuary, diffusing the seductive charm of sentiment over passions and propensities at which rigid morality must frown. His heart, devoted to indolence, seems to think that there is wealth enough in happiness, but seldom happiness enough in wealth; and the cheerfulness with which he brightens his old age is interesting and endearing like his own rose, he is fragrant even in decay. But the most peculiar feature of his mind is that love of simplicity, which he attributes to himself so very feelingly, and which breathes characteristically through all that he has sung. In truth, if we omit these vices in our estimate which ethnic religion not only connived at, but consecrated, we shall say that the disposition of our poet was amiable; his morality was relaxed, but not abandoned; and Virtue, with her zone |