A lovely dryad rang'd the Thracian wild,
Her air enchanting, and her aspect mild:
To chase the bounding hart was all her joy,
Averse from Hymen, and the Cyprian boy;
O'er hills an valleys was her beauty fam'd,
And fair Caissa was the damsel nam'd.
The great claim to fame of the 18th-century British philologist Sir William Jones was that he discovered a link between Sanskrit and Western languages like Latin and Greek. This discovery was a great leap forward in solving the mystery of the world's languages, because it led to the establishment of the hypothetical lost language known as "Proto-Indo-European," which now forms a major pillar of linguistics.
But Jones also gave the chess world a long and beautiful poem called "Caissa, or the Game at Chess," from which the stanza above is taken. Originally written in Latin when Jones was just seventeen years old, the poem elucidates the history and identity of Caïssa (pronounced ky-EE-suh), the mysterious "Thracian dryad" who, thanks to Sir William's poem, presides over our royal game as its "muse" to this day.
If any of my quillions of readers are interested in perusing this worthy work further, it can be found here.
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