REMARKS ON ANACREON.

THERE is very little known with certainty of the life of Anacreon. Chamæleon Heracleotes, who wrote upon the subject, has been lost in the general wreck of ancient literature. The editors of the poet have collected the few trifling anecdotes which are scattered through the extant authors of antiquity, and supplying the deficiency of materials by fictions of their own imagination, they have arranged, what they call, a life of Anacreon. These specious fabrications are intended to indulge that interest which we naturally feel in the biography of illustrious men; but it is rather a dangerous kind of illusion, as it confounds the limits of history and romance, and is too often supported by unfaithful citation.

Our poet was born in the city of Téos, in the delicious region of Ionia, where everything respired voluptuousness. The time of his birth appears to have been in the sixth century before Christ, and he flourished at that remarkable period, when, under the polished tyrants Hipparchus and Polycrates, Athens and Samos were the rival asylums of genius. The name of his father is doubtful, and therefore cannot be very interesting. His family was perhaps illustrious; but those who discover in Plato that he was a descendant of the monarch Codrus, exhibit, as usual, more zeal than accuracy.

The disposition and talents of Anacreon recommended him to the monarch of Samos, and he was formed to be the friend of such a prince as Polycrates. Susceptible only to the pleasures, he felt not the corruptions of the court; and while Pythagoras fled from the tyrant, Anacreon was celebrating his praises on the lyre. We are told too by Maximus Tyrius, that by the influence of his amatory songs he softened the mind of Polycrates into a spirit of benevolence towards his subjects.

Hipparchus, who now maintained at Athens the power which his father Pisistratus had usurped, was one of those elegant princes who have polished the fetters of their sub

jects. He was the first, according to Plato, who edited the poems of Homer, and commanded them to be sung by the rhapsodists at the celebration of the Panathenæa. As his court was the galaxy of genius, Anacreon should not be absent. Hipparchus sent a barge for him; the poet embraced the invitation, and the muses and the loves were wafted with him to Athens.

The manner of Anacreon's death was singular. We are told that in the eighty-fifth year of his age he was choked by a grape-stone; and however we may smile at their 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,

A grape has closed for ever!

Here let the ivy kiss the poet's tomb,
Here let the rose he loved with laurels bloom,
In bauds that ne'er shall sever!

But far be thou, oh! far, unholy vine,
By whom the favourite minstrel of the Nine
Expired his rosy breath;

Thy god himself now blushes to confess,
Unholy vine! he feels he loves thee less,
Since poor Anacreon's death!

After the very enthusiastic eulogiums bestowed by the ancients and moderns upon the poems of Anacreon, we need not be diffident in expressing our raptures at their beauty, nor hesitate to pronounce them the most polished remains of antiquity. They are all beauty, all enchantment. He steals us so insensibly along with him, that we sympathize even in his excesses. In his amatory odes there is a delicacy of compliment not to be found in any other ancient poet. Love at that period was rather an unrefined emotion; and the intercourse of the sexes was animated more by passion than sentiment. They knew not those little tendernesses which form the spiritual part of affection; their expression of feeling was therefore rude and unvaried, and the poetry of love deprived of its most captivating graces. Anacreon, however, attained some ideas of this gallantry; and the same delicacy of mind which led him to this refinement, prevented him from yielding to the freedom of language, which has sullied the pages of all the other poets. His descriptions are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas, not the words. He is

sportive without being wanton, and ardent without being licentious. His poetic invention is most brilliantly displayed in those allegorical fictions, which so many have endeavoured to imitate, because all have confessed them to be inimitable. Simplicity is the distinguishing feature of these odes, and they interest by their innocence, while they fascinate by their beauty; they are, indeed, the infants of the Muses, and may be said to lisp in numbers.

I shall not be accused of enthusiastic partiality by those who have read and felt the original; but to others I am conscious that this should not be the language of a translator, whose faint reflection of these beauties can but little justify his admiration of them.

In the age of Anacreon music and poetry were inseparable. These kindred talents were for a long time associated, and the poet always sung his own compositions to the lyre. It is probable that they were not set to any regular air, but rather a kind of musical recitation, which was varied according to the fancy and feelings of the moment. The poems of Anacreon were sung at banquets as late as the time of Aulus Gellius, who tells us that he heard one of the odes performed at a birthday entertainment.

The singular beauty of our poet's style, and perhaps the careless facility with which he appears to have trifled, have induced, as I remarked, a number of imitations. Some have succeeded with wonderful felicity, as may be discerned in the few odes which are attributed to writers of a later period. But none of his emulators have been so dangerous to his fame as those Greek ecclesiastics of the early ages, who, conscious of inferiority to their prototypes, determined on removing the possibility of comparison, and, under a semblance of moral zeal, destroyed the most exquisite treasures of antiquity. The zeal by which these bishops professed to be actuated, gave birth more innocently, indeed, to an absurd species of parody, as repugnant to piety as it is to taste, where the poet of voluptuousness was made a preacher of the gospel, and his muse, like the Venus in armour at Lacedæmon, was arrayed in all the severities of priestly instruction. Such was the "Anacreon Recantatus," by Carolus de Aquino, a Jesuit, published 1701, which consisted of a series of palinodes to the several songs of our poet. Such too was the Christian Anacreon of Patrignanus, another Jesuit, who preposterously transferred to a most sacred subject all that Anacreon had sung to festivity.

We come now to a retrospect of the editions of Anacreon. To Henry Stephen we are indebted for having first recovered his remains from the obscurity in which they had

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reposed for so many ages. He found the 7th ode, as we are told, on the cover of an old book, and communicated it to Victorius, who mentions the circumstance in his "Various Readings." Stephen was then very young; and this discovery was considered by some critics of that day as a literary imposition. In 1554, however, he gave Anacreon to the world, accompanied with annotations and a Latin version of the greater part of the odes. The learned still hesitated to receive them as the relics of the Teian bard, and suspected them to be the fabrication of some monks of the sixteenth century. This was an idea from which the classic muse recoiled; and the Vatican manuscript, consulted by Scaliger and Salmasius, confirmed the antiquity of most of the poems. A very inaccurate copy of this MS. was taken by Isaac Vossius, and this is the authority which Barnes has followed in his collation; accordingly he misrepresents almost as often as he quotes; and the subsequent editors, relying upon him, have spoken of the manuscript with not less confidence than ignorance. The literary world has at length been gratified with this curious memorial of the poet, by the industry of the Abbé Spaletti, who, in 1781, published at Rome a facsimile of the pages of the Vatican manuscript, which contained the odes of Anacreon.

Monsieur Gail has given a catalogue of all the editions and translations of Anacreon. I find their number to be much greater than I could possibly have had an opportunity of consulting. I shall therefore content myself with enumerating those editions only which I have been able to collect; they are very few, but I believe they are the most important.

The edition by Henry Stephen, 1554, at Paris-the Latin version is by Colomesius attributed to John Dorat.

The old French translations, by Ronsard and Belleauthe former published in 1555, the latter in 1556. It appears that Henry Stephen communicated his manuscript of Anacreon to Ronsard before he published it, by a note of Muretus upon one of the sonnets of that poet.

The edition by Le Fevre, 1660.

The edition by Madame Dacier, 1681, with a prose translation.

The edition by Longepierre, 1684, with a translation in

verse.

The edition by Baxter, London, 1695.

A French translation by La Fosse, 1704.

"L'Histoire des Odes d'Anacreon," by Monsieur Gaçon; Rotterdam, 1712.

A translation in English verse, by several hands, 1713, in which the odes by Cowley are inserted.

The edition by Barnes, London, 1721.

The edition by Dr. Trapp, 1733, with a Latin version in elegiac metre.

A translation in English verse, by John Addison, 1735. A collection of Italian translations of Anacreon, published at Venice, 1736, consisting of those by Corsini, Regnier, Salvini, Marchetti, and one by several anonymous authors.

A translation in English verse, by Fawkes and Doctor Broome, 1760.

Another, anonymous, 1768.

The edition by Spaletti, at Rome, 1781; with the facsimile of the Vatican MS.

The edition by Degen, 1786, who published also a German translation of Anacreon, esteemed the best.

A translation in English verse, by Urquhart, 1787. The edition by Citoyen Gail, at Paris, 7th year, 1799, with a prose translation.