Lord Carlisle, in his Diary in the Turkish and Greek Waters, thus speaks of Corfu, which he considers to be the ancient Phæacian island:
"The sites explain the Odyssey. The temple of the sea-god could not have been more fitly placed, upon a grassy platform of the most elastic turf, on the brow of a crag commanding harbor, and channel, and ocean. Just at the entrance of the inner harbor there is a picturesque rock with a small convent perched upon it, which by one legend is the transformed pinnace of Ulysses.
"Almost the only river in the island is just at the proper distance from the probable site of the city and palace of the king, to justify the princess Nausicaa having had resort to her chariot and to luncheon when she went with the maidens of the court to wash their garments."
245-254. Poems: Tennyson, To Virgil, of which a few stanzas are given in the text; R. C. Rogers, Virgil's Tomb. Æneas and Anchises: Chaucer, Hous of Fame, 165; 140-470 (pictures of Troy); Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Tempest, II, i; 2 Henry VI, V, ii; Julius Cæsar, I, ii; Antony and Cleopatra, IV, ii; Hamlet, II, ii; Waller, Panegyric to the Lord-Protector (The Stilling of Neptune's Storm).
Dido: Chaucer, Legende of Good Women, 923; Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Song of Iopas (unfinished); Marlowe, Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, IV, xii; Titus Andronicus, II, iii; Hamlet, II, ii. Palinurus: see Scott's Marmion, Introd. to Canto I (with reference to the death of William Pitt).
The Sibyl. The following legend of the Sibyl is fixed at a later date. In the reign of one of the Tarquins there appeared before the king a woman who offered him nine books for sale. The king refused to purchase them, whereupon the woman went away and burned three of the books, and returning offered the remaining books for the same price she had asked for the nine. The king again rejected them; but when the woman, after burning three books more, returned and asked for the three remaining the same price which she had before asked for the nine, his curiosity was excited, and he purchased the books. They were found to contain the destinies of the Roman state. They were kept in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, preserved in a stone chest, and allowed to be inspected only by especial officers appointed for that duty, who on great occasions consulted them and interpreted their oracles to the people.
There were various Sibyls; but the Cumæan Sibyl, of whom Ovid and Virgil write, is the most celebrated of them. Ovid's story of her life protracted to one thousand years may be intended to represent the various Sibyls as being only reappearances of one and the same individual.
Illustrative. Young, in the Night Thoughts, alludes to the Sibyl. See also Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, II, ii; Othello, III, iv.
In Art. Figs. 181-183, in text. The Virgil of Raphael (drawing in the Museum, Venice); the Æneas of the Ægina Marbles (Glyptothek, Munich). P. Guérin's painting, Æneas at the Court of Dido; Raphael, Dido; Turner, Dido building Carthage. The Sibyls in Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, Rome; the Cumæan Sibyl of Domenichino; Elihu Vedder's Cumæan Sibyl.
255-257. Rhadamanthus: E. W. Gosse, The Island of the Blest. Tantalus: Cowper, The Progress of Error; L. Morris, Epic of Hades; W. W. Story, Tantalus. Ixion: poem by Browning in Jocoseria. See Pope, St. Cecilia's Day, 67; Rape of the Lock, 2, 133. Sisyphus: Lord Lytton, Death and Sisyphus; L. Morris, in The Epic of Hades.