The influence of Sappho on English and American literature has been large. We have already shown this in our citations, as it seemed better to quote some of the great English writers when we were speaking of Sappho herself. Addison was devoted to her, but his contemporary, Pope, by translating Ovid’s _Sappho to Phaon_, aggravated the ill-fame which Ovid had given her. Pope often mentions her, but without knowledge of the true Sappho. In _Moral Essays_ (_Epistle_ III, 121) we have the line: “Why she (Phryne) and Sappho raise that monstrous sum?”, referring to Lady Montague and to Miss Skerrett, the latter of whom was the mistress and later the second wife of Sir Robert Walpole. Lady Mary (Montague) is alluded to also in _Epistle_ II, 24:
As Sappho’s diamonds with her dirty smock; Or Sappho at her toilet’s greasy task, With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask.
Also in the _Prologue to the Satires_, in the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, 369, we read: “Sappho can tell you how this man was bit.” Sappho is mentioned again in _Imitations of Horace_ (_Satire_ I, l. 83) and in _Satires of Dr. John Donne_ (II, 6), in these words: “As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.” In his letters to Cromwell, Pope often mentions two Sapphos, one his own and the other Cromwell’s: “My service, pray, to the other Sappho, who it is to be hoped, has not yet cast herself headlong from any of the Leucades about London, although her Phaon lately fled from her into Lincolnshire.” Even in the letter to Steele, when he makes acknowledgment to the “fine fragment of Sappho,” Pope is disingenuous and affected, as he suppresses the name of Flatman, to whom he was really indebted.
Wordsworth, influenced probably by Welcker’s defense, had a good opinion of Sappho (cf. the quotation, p. 247). But his dear friend, Sir Walter Scott, seems to be ignorant of her, though the lines on the _Evening Star_, which we have quoted (p. 64), sound strikingly Sapphic. Coleridge seems to echo the famous fragment about the pippin on the topmost bough in his _One Red Leaf on the Topmost Twig_; but as he shows no other influence of Sappho this is probably an accidental resemblance. Thomas Moore, as a translator of Anacreon with whom Sappho was generally linked, knew Sappho well and translated some of her fragments into Latin as well as English. His rendering of the _Weaving Song_ is especially charming (cf. p. 79). Another contemporary Irish poet, the Reverend George Croly, tells how: