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With slight resentment in her manner, Eudora answered: "Anacreon is the most beautiful of poets; and I think you speak too harshly of the son of Clinias." "I am sorry for you, if you can perceive the beautiful where the pure is wanting," rejoined Philothea; "You have changed, since my residence in the Acropolis.
Up and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, "encourager of sleep," sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life to the grass. It is by Zonas the Sardian: and the rendering by Mr. Hay:
Song became the prevailing literary demand, and was supplied abundantly by such choice singers as Sappho, Alcæus, Anacreon, Simonides, and others of the soft and cheerful vein, the biting satires of Archilochus, the noble odes of Pindar, the war anthems of Tyrtæus, and the productions of many of lesser fame.
They sang "Harmodius"; next the song of Anacreon resounded, that song in which he complained that on a time he had found Aphrodite's boy chilled and weeping under trees; that he brought him in, warmed him, dried his wings, and the ungrateful child pierced his heart with an arrow, from that moment peace had deserted the poet.
The last lyric poet of this period that we shall notice was Anacreon, a native of Teos, in Ionia, who flourished about 530 B.C. He was a voluptuary, who sang beautifully of love, and wine, and nature, and who has been called the courtier and laureate of tyrants, in whose society, and especially in that of Polyc'rates and Hippar'chus, his days were spent.
It is equally without poetic merit, except in a few incidental songs. Of these, some are borrowed from Greene, one is a translation from Anacreon also printed in the author's Poetical Diversions, some are original. Of the last, one may be worth quoting. There is one obvious omission from the above list of plays founded on pastoral romances, but it has been made intentionally.
Moore pours out several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensuality of the dead man of genius. There was no horror for Byron. Toward him all was suavity and decorous bienseance. That lively sense of benefits to be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with both his little eyes. In the judgment of a liberal like Mr. Moore, were not the errors of a lord excusable?
Suppers were eaten at which epicures had not lingered; wine gulped down which would not have inspired Anacreon, and segars smoked that Sir Walter Raleigh might have relished! Apropos of segars I should have said cheroots Manillas scent the Indian air, Havanas have few lips to greet them in the East.
But every thing essential was done for the Athenian tragedy when Phrynichus took it from the satyr and placed it under the protection of the muse when, forsaking the humours of the rustic farce, he selected a solemn subject from the serious legends of the most vivid of all mythologies when he breathed into the familiar measures of the chorus the grandeur and sweetness of the lyric ode when, in a word, taking nothing from Thespis but the stage and the performers, he borrowed his tale from Homer and his melody from Anacreon.
William Baxter, the editor of Anacreon, was the nephew of Richard Baxter, the nonconformist divine. 'By-the-bye, wrote Sir Walter Scott, 'I am far from being of the number of those angry Scotsmen who imputed to Johnson's national prejudices all or a great part of the report he has given of our country in his Voyage to the Hebrides.
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