ORPHEUS. 
% All dangers 7 length the lovely bride 
her melodi 
A fault which eafy pardon might receive, 
Were lovers judges, or could hell forgive. 
For near the confines of etherial light, 
And longing for the glimmering of a fight, 
unwary bid calt a loo a ind, 
Forgetful o aw r of his mind. 
Straight all te ie exhal’d i in ee fmoke ; ; 
And his long toils were forfeit for a loo 
D vyden’ s Virgil. 
Tzetzes explains the fable of his drawing his wife Euri- 
dice from hell by his great {kill in medicine, with which 
r words, {natched her 
thofe whom they had 
recovered from dangerous difeafes. 
The bifhop of Gloucefter, in = learned and admirable 
account of the Eleufinian myfteries, fays, ‘* While thefe 
mytteries were confined to Egypt, ee native country, and 
while the Grecian lawgivers went thither to be initiated, as 
a kind of defignation to their office, the ceremony would be 
naturally defcribed in terms highly allegorical. This way 
of {peaking was ufed by Orpheus, Bacchus, and others ; 
it. So rpheus is faid to get he hell by the power of his 
harp: 
‘¢ Threichius fretus cithara, sae a canoris.’ 
Virg. ver. 119g. 
ir is, in quality of lawgiver ; the harp a eing “ known 
bol of his laws, by which he humanized a rude and bar- 
he people. Had an old poem, under the name of Or- 
pheus, entitled * A Defeent into Hell,” been now extant, 
it would perhaps have thewn us, that no more was meant 
than Orpheus’s initiation. 
y ancient writers, in {peaking of his death, relate, 
that the Thracian women ged at being aban y 
their hufbands, who were difciples of Orpheus, concealed 
themfelves in the woods, in order to fatiate their vengeance ; 
and, notwithftanding they poftponed the perpetration of their 
defign fome time through fear, at length, by drinking to a 
degree of intoxication, they fo far fortified their courage as 
to put him t And Plutarch affures us, that the 
Thracians Peirce their women, even in his time, for 
the barbarity of this action 
Our venerable bard is defended by the author of the 
“ Divine Legation,”’ from fome aan to his difad- 
vantage in Diogenes Laertius. <‘ It is true,” fays he, “ if 
uncertain report was to be believ ge eries were cor- 
rupted very early ; for Orpheus himfelf is faid to have abufed 
them u was an art the yite of late 
times e nith 
employed 
pederatts of after agee {candalized the 
Befides, the ftory is fo ill laid, that it is dete€&ted by the 
ureft records of antiquity : for in cenfequence of what 
they fabled of Orpheus in the myfteries, they pretended he 
was torn in pieces by the women ; whereas it appeared from ~ 
the infcription on his monument, at Dium in Macedonia, that 
he was ftruck dead a ae the envied death of the re- 
puted favourites of the gods. 
aid, however, that his fepulchre was removed from Li- 
ethra, upon nt Olympus, where Orpheus was bor 
and was thence transferred to Dium tl ac 
M 
after the ruin of Libethra, by a fudden inundation, 
a dreadful ftorm had occafioned. This event is very minutely 
related by Paufanias. 
Virgil beftows the firft place in his Elyfium upon the le- 
giflators, and thofe who brought mankind from a {tate of 
nature into fociety. 
«* Magnanimi hercés, nati melioribus annis.”’ 
At the head of thefe is Orpheus, the moft renowned of the 
European aaah ; but better known under the character 
of poet: for the firft laws being written in meafure, to allure 
men to ine nd, when learnt, to retain them, the 
fable would have it, that by the force of Sep Orpheus 
foftened the favage inhabitants of Thrac 
66 
Thréicius longa cum vette facerdos 
Obloquitur numeris feptem difcrimina vocum : 
Jamque eadem digitis, jam peétine pulfat zigenge 
— acs ver. ee 
, at mo ie ae ur { “Ot her 
were afterwards added to it by the fecond Me cury, or by 
hion ; ine according to feveral traditions preferved by 
Greek hiftoriane, it was Orpheus who completed the fecond 
tetrachord, which extended the {cale to a heptachord, or 
Jfeven founds, implied by the /eptem difcrimina vocum : for the 
affertion any writers, that Orpheus added two new 
ftrings to the lyre, which before had feven, clafhes with the 
claims of Pythagoras to the invention of the o€tachord, or 
addition of an eighth found to the heptachord, which made 
i) eee who flourifhed long before fculpture was 
known in Greece 
nomacritus, amphus, 
leufinian my fteries ; 
efthood was hereditary i in this fami 
e poems un nder the name of Or- - 
c diale&@, but have fince been 
ed, or modernifed. 7 was the common opinion 
in antiquity that they were genuine ; but even thofe who 
oubted of it, gave them to the save Pythagoreans, and 
fome of them tc Pythagoras himfelf, who has aaron 
and 
ee is, the 
