WHAT THE OLD POETS SAY. 29 



'Twas when the hawk, marauder fell, 

 Bore off the dappled Philomel, 

 On his crooked claws impaled, 

 Piteously the poor bird wailed. 



By Eschylus and Sophocles, and the tender and plaintive 

 Euripides himself the very Nightingale of attic trage- 

 dians as with Moschus, and the other bucolic poets, 

 there is this prevailing sentiment expressed ; nor must we 

 except even the satirists and comic writers of Greece, as 

 might be shown by quotations, did our space permit ; a 

 line or two from Aristophanes we must give, and it shall 

 be Gary's admirable rendering, 



come, my mate ; break off thy slumbers, 

 And round thee fling thy plaintive numbers, 

 In a most melodious hymn, 

 Warbled from thy brown throat dim. 



The Latin imitators of these old masters of the classic 

 lyre might also be cited to show how with them, too, the 

 Nightingale was generally considered a sorrowful and com- 

 plaining bird ; for although Virgil speaks of it as * piping 

 beneath the poplar shade ' in careless joyance, yet most of 

 them who do make an allusion to it, feign, with Ovid, to 

 behold in this feathered songster the transformed Philomela, 

 daughter of Pandion, King of Athens ; cruelly misused, 

 and deprived of her sweet organ of speech her silver 

 tongue by Tereus, King of Thrace, her sister's hus- 

 band, she was changed by the pitying gods so runs the 

 fable into 



The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell, 



as Thomas Hood calls it, very appropriately likening the 

 bird to the most passionate and tender of female poets. 

 This is the ' luckless bird,' as Horace calls it ; the < sad,' 

 the ' complaining,' the * love-lorn,' the ' plaintive,' the 

 * grief-stricken ' Philomela of Sidney, and Dray ton, and 

 Drummond, and Browne, and Fletcher, and many other of 

 our early pastoral and dramatic poets, as well as some of 

 later times, who, like Pollok, make sorrow still the burden 

 of its song : 



