were only human-faced birds, they must have confined their attractions to singing; for hands are required to play the musical instruments which are sometimes given them. But there were three of them, which is more than enough for harmony; and if, in addition to their harmony, they had beautiful faces, it is no matter how monstrously they terminated the more monstrous the charmer, the more ghastly and complete the fiction.

These appalling seducers, according to some, were originally sea-nymphs of the proper shape, till Ceres punished them for not assisting her daughter when carried away by Pluto; though Ovid says that they took that adventure so much to heart, as to beg the gods to bestow wings on them, that they might search for her by sea as well as by land. It is added by others, that Juno (jealous, we suppose, after the usual fashion of that very uncomfortable and sublime busybody) encouraged them to challenge the Muses to a trial of song; upon which, being conquered, their kinswoman plucked them, and made crowns of their feathers. This is said to have taken place in Crete. If so, they must have migrated; for they are generally supposed to have inhabited certain islands on the coast of Naples, thence called Sirenusæ, where an oracle informed them that, unless they could entice and destroy every one who passed within hearing, they should perish themselves. When their fatal hour came, they are reported by some to have been changed into rocks, a fit ending for the hardness of sensuality.*

"Their crimes," says

* But this, it seems, was not the last of the Sirens. W. J. Broderip, "were not sufficiently expiated. Years rolled on their ceaseless course. Greece was swallowed up by Rome, who in her turn fell at the feet of the Goth; and in the fulness of time there arose a wizard from the great northern hive, he of the polar star, who waved his wand, aroused the

Various names have been given to the Sirens, expressive of their attractions. The most received are Leucosia, Parthenope, and Ligeia; or

"The Fair, the Tuneful, and the Maiden-faced."

(It is impossible, on such an occasion, to resist giving the aspect of a verse, to words naturally tempting us to fall into one.)* Ligeia, however, may perhaps be rather translated the shrill and high-sounding; expressive of the triumphant nature of the female voice, - which rises above all others, in a very peculiar and consummate manner, as any one may have noticed in a theatre. Parthenope had a famous tomb at Naples, and gave her appellation to the old city. The mention of these two names in Milton is not introduced with the poet's usual learning; otherwise, he would have designated the bearers by the meanings of them. He has given Ligeia the comb of a mermaid; the spirit in “Comus” is adjuring the nymph Sabrina :

"By Thetis' tinsel-slipper'd feet,

And the songs of Sirens sweet;

By dead Parthenope's dear tomb,

And fair Ligeia's golden comb,

Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks."

We do not quarrel with him, however, for turning Ligeia

Sirens from the annihilation into which they had escaped, and degenerated them into one of the lowest reptile forms of America," the Perennibranchiate Batrachian. If you wish to know what a Perennibranchiate Batrachian is, reader, we refer you to Mr. Broderip's pleasant "Leaves from the NoteBook of a Naturalist."- ED.

* "Country gentlemen," however, must not think that these names have been translated in the order of the Greek; for it is "Parthenope "which is "maiden-faced," and not Ligeia. But it would have had a horrible gaping sound, and most unsiren-like, to let the terminating vowel of either of the two other names come before an and-Leucosia, Ligeia, and Parthenope.

into a mermaid. A great poet, being one of the creating gods of his art, has a right to mould his creatures as he pleases, provided he does it with verisimilitude; but we shall speak more of this in a minute, when we come to see what Spenser has done. "Sleeking her soft alluring locks" is a very beautiful line; you see, and, indeed hear, the passage of the comb through those moist tresses.

Allegorically, the Sirens are sensual pleasures, who, though deriving their charms from one of the Muses, are conquered by a combination of all. Topographically (for they have been accounted for, also in that manner), they are said to have alluded to “a certaine bay, contracted within winding straights and broken cliffes; which, by the singing of the windes, and beating of the billowes, report" (says Archimachus, as quoted by Sandys), "a delightful harmony, alluring those who saile by to approach; when forthwith they are throwne against the rocks by the waves, and swallowed in the violent eddyes."* Humanly, they are thought to have been a set of enticing women, living on the coast of Naples (where divers of the like sort, as Sandys would have said, may to this day be found), and alluring strangers to stop among them, by the pleasures and accomplishments with which they were surrounded. But we are told of them, also, zoologically; for some have taken them for certain Indian birds, who set mariners to sleep with their singing and then devour them; while "some, as Gaza and Trapezuntius (quoth our old friend), "affirme that they have seene such creatures in the sea; either the divells assuming such shape, to countenance the fable, or framed in the fantasie by remote resemblances, as we give imaginary formes unto clouds,

See the Notes to the Fifth Book of his "Ovid," fol. edit. p. 101.

and call those monsters of the deepe by the names of land-creatures, which imperfectly carry their similitude."

It is easy to see how Sirens, living near the sea, came to be considered mermaids. A modern Latin poet, quoted by Sandys (Pontanus), adopted this notion, and has a fable of his own upon it. He says that the Sirens were certain Neapolitan young ladies, who, not content with being handsome and accomplished, took to wearing paint and false hair, and went with their necks bare to the waist, for which Minerva one day, as they were coming out of her temple, suddenly turned their pretty ankles into fish-tails, and sent them rolling into the sea. The poet writes this history in an epistle to his wife, as a warning to all pretty church-goers how they paint and expose themselves.

The writer of the piscatory Italian drama, entitled "Alceo" (Act IV. sc. I.), gives the same figure to the Sirens, but differs from most in his account of their cruelty. He says, that after stopping mariners in their course, they went to the vessel, instead of drawing it ashore, and threw the wretches into the sea.

The moderns, in general, have certainly regarded the Siren as a mermaid. Milton chose to be of that opinion, as we may gather from the passage above quoted. Chaucer, in his translation of the "Romance of the Rose," has inserted some lines, expressly to inform us that what was called a mermaid in England, the French called a Siren. you devise,

"These birdes that I

They sung their song as fair and well

As angels don espirituell ;

And trusteth me, when I them herd

Full lustily and well I ferd;

For never yet such melody

Was heard of men that mighte die.

Such sweet song was them among,

That me thought it no birdes song,
But it was wonder like to be
Song of meremaidens of the sea,
That for their singing is so clear;

Though we meremaidens clepe them here
In English, as is our usàunce,

Men clepe them sereins in Fraunce."

But if a poet required express authority in this matter, it is furnished him by the great modern mythologist, Spenser, who, though he had all the learning of the ancient world, vindicated his right to look at the world of poetry with his own eyes, and to recreate its forms, like a Demiurgos, whenever it suited his purposes to do so. He knew that no man better understood the soul of fiction, and therefore, that it was not only allowable, but sometimes proper, for him to embody it as he found convenient. There is something, we confess, to our apprehensions more ghastly and subtle in the ancient notion of a bird with a woman's head; but Spenser, in the passage where he introduces his Sirens, precedes and follows it with an account of things dreadful, and is for placing nothing but a calm voluptuousness in the middle. After all, we are not sure that there would not have been a subtler link with his birds "unfortunate," had he made his charmers partake of their nature; but, however, mermaids he has painted them, and mermaids they are for all poets to come, unless a greater shall arise to say otherwise :

"And now they nigh approached to the sted
Whereat those mermayds dwelt. It was a still
And calmy bay, on th' one side sheltered
With the brode shadow of an hoarie hill;

On th' other side an high rocke toured still,
That 'twixt them both a pleasaunt port they made,
And did like an halfe theatre fulfill.

There those five sisters had continuall trade,

And used to bath themselves in that deceiptfull shade.