relinquished. Had he been connected with any tered about the shore. At length an officer, dedistinguished political families, his love of emi-puted by his expected adversary, arrived, and not nence, seconded by such example and sympathy, only accounted satisfactorily for the delay that had would have impelled him, no doubt, to seek re- taken place, but made every other explanation, with nown in the fields of party warfare; but the lone-respect to the supposed offence, that the two friends liness of his position in society at this period, left could require. destitute, as he was, of all those sanctions and sympathies by which youth, at its first start, is usually surrounded, was of itself enough to discourage him from embarking in a pursuit, where it is chiefly on such extrinsic advantages that any chance of success must depend. So far from taking an active part in the proceedings of his noble brethren, he appears to have regarded even the ceremony of his attendance among them as irksome and mortifying; and, in a few days after his admission to his seat, he withdrew himself, in disgust, to the seclusion of his own Abbey.

On his return to London, at the end of April, he found the first edition of his Poem nearly exhausted, and set immediately about preparing another, to which he determined to prefix his name. The additions he now made to the work were considerable; and it was not till about the middle of the ensuing month that the new edition was ready to go to press. He had, during his absence from town, fixed definitively with his friend, Mr. Hobhouse, that they should leave England together early in the following June, and it was his wish to see the last proofs of the volume corrected before his departure.

On the 17th July, Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse left Lisbon, travelling on horseback to Seville and Cadiz, from whence they embarked in the Hyperion frigate for Gibraltar. After a short stay at the fortress, he, on the 19th of August, took his departure for Malta in the packet.

While at Malta, in consequence of some trifling misunderstanding, he was on the point of fighting a duel with an officer of the staff of General Oakes. The meeting being appointed for a very early hour in the morning, his companion had to awake him from a sound sleep; but, on their arrival at the place of rendezvous on the sea-shore, the adverse party; from some mistake in the arrangements, was not forthcoming. Though their baggage was already on board the brig that was to convey them to Albania, Lord Byron determined to give his antagonist the chances of at least another hour, and for nearly that space of time his friend and he saun

The brig of war in which they sailed, having been ordered to convoy a fleet of small merchantmen to Patras and Prevesa, they remained, for two or three days, at anchor off the former place. From thence, proceeding to their ultimate destination, and catching a sunset view of Missolonghi in their way, they landed, on the 29th of September, at Prevesa.

The route which Lord Byron now took through Albania, as well as those subsequent journeys through other parts of Turkey, which he performed in company with his friend Mr. Hobhouse, may be ! traced, by such as are desirous of details on the subject, in the account which the latter gentleman has given of his travels; an account which, interesting from its own excellence, becomes still more so from the feeling that Lord Byron is, as it were, present through its pages, and that we there follow his first youthful footsteps into the land with whose name he has intertwined his own for ever.

In a letter addressed to his mother, dated Prevesa,.Nov. 12, 1809, Lord Byron thus describes his first audience of the celebrated Turkish Governor of Albania:

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"The next day, I was introduced to Ali Pacha. I was dressed in a full suit of staff uniform, with a very magnificent sabre, etc. The vizier received me in a large room paved with marble; a fountain was playing in the centre; the apartment was surrounded by scarlet ottomans. He received me standing, a wonderful compliment from a Mussulman, and made me sit down on his right hand. have a Greek interpreter for general use, but a physician of Ali's, named Femlario, who understands Latin, acted for me on this occasion. His first question was, why, at so early an age, I left my country?—(the Turks have no idea of travelling for amusement). He then said, the English minister, Captain Leake, had told him I was of a great family, and desired his respects to my mother; which I now, in the name of Ali Pacha, present to you. He said he was certain I was a man of birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little

white hands, (1) and expressed himself pleased thirty);—whether it will last is another matter." with my appearance and garb. He told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on me as his son. Indeed, he treated me like a child, sending, me almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit, and sweetmeats, twenty times a-day. He begged me to visit him often, and at night, when he was at leisure. I then, after coffee and pipes, retired for the first time. I saw him thrice afterwards. It is singular that the Turks, who have no hereditary dignities, and few great families, except the Sultans, pay so much respect to birth; for I found my pedigree more regarded than my title.”

ments which Lord Byron and his friend now occu- workings of the passions was what, with the aid of pied. imagination, at length generated the power; and that faculty which entitled him afterwards to be so truly styled “the searcher of dark bosoms," may be traced to, perhaps its earliest stirrings, in the sort of feeling that produced these words.

Ten weeks had flown rapidly away, when the unexpected offer of a passage in an English sloop of war to Smyrna induced the travellers to make immediate preparations for departure, and on the 5th of March they reluctantly took leave of Athens. At Smyrna, Lord Byron took up his residence in the house of the consul-general, and remained there, with the exception of two or three days employed in a visit to the ruins of Ephesus, till the 11th of April. It was during this time that the two first cantos of Childe Harold, which he had begun five months before at Ioannina, were completed.

On their approaching the island of Zea, he expressed a wish to be put on shore. Accordingly, having taken leave of his companion, he was landed upon this small island, with his two Albanians, a Tartar, and one English servant; and in one of his manuscripts he has himself described the proud solitary feeling with which he stood to see the ship sail swiftly away-leaving him there, in a land of strangers, alone.

On the 27th of July, 1810, he left Athens in com

On the 11th of April he left Smyrna in the Salsette frigate, which had been ordered to Constantinople for the purpose of conveying the ambassa-pany with the Marquis of Sligo. Having travelled dor, Mr.Adair, to England, and, after an exploratory visit to the ruins of Troas, arrived, at the beginning of the following month, in the Dardanelles.

From Constantinople, where he arrived on the 14th of May, he addressed four or five letters to Mrs. Byron, in almost every one of which his achievement in swimming across the Hellespont is commemorated.

In one of these letters, dated May 24th, after referring, as usual, to his notable exploit, "in humble imitation of Leander of amorous memory; though," he adds, “I had no Hero to receive me on the other side of the Hellespont."

together as far as Corinth, they from thence branched off in different directions,-Lord Sligo to pay a visit to the capital of the Morea, and Lord Byron to proceed to Patras, where he had some business with the English consul, Mr. Strané.

The greater part of the two following months he appears to have occupied in making a tour of the Morea; and the very distinguished reception he met with from Vely Pacha, the son of Ali, is mentioned with much pride, in more than one of his letters.

On his return from this tour to Patras, he was seized with a fit of illness, in many respects similar to the last fatal malady with which, fourteen years afterwards, he was attacked in nearly the same spot!

He was a good deal weakened and thinned by this illness at Patras, and, on his return to Athens, standing one day before a looking-glass, he said to

On the 14th of July, his fellow-traveller and himself took their departure from Constantinople, on board the Salsette frigate,-Mr. Hobhouse with the intention of accompanying the ambassador to England, and Lord Byron with the resolution of visiting his beloved Greece again. To Mr. Adair he appear-Lord Sligo-" How pale I look! I should like, I ed, at this time (and I find that Mr. Bruce, who met him afterwards at Athens, conceived the same impression of him), to be labouring under great dejection of spirits. One circumstance related to me, as having occurred in the course of the passage, is not a little striking. Perceiving, as he walked the deck, a small yataghan or Turkish dagger on one of the benches, he took it up, unsheathed it, and, having stood for a few moments contemplating the blade, was heard to say, in an under voice, "I should like to know how a person feels after committing a murder!" In this startling speech we may detect, I think, the germ of his future Giaours and

think, to die of a consumption."—" Why of a consumption ?" asked his friend. "Because then," he answered, "the women would all say, 'See that poor Byron! how interesting he looks in dying!'" In this anecdote,-which, slight as it is, the relater remembered as a proof of the poet's consciousness of his own beauty,-may be traced also the habitual reference of his imagination to that sex, which, however he affected to despise it, influenced, more or less, the flow and colour of all his thoughts.

He spoke often of his mother to Lord Sligo, and with a feeling that seemed little short of aversion. Some time or other," he said, "I will tell you why I feel thus towards her."-A few days after

when they were bathing together in the Gulf of Le-being, in a sensible woman's eyes, equivalent to panto, he referred to this promise, and, pointing concession, they became, from thenceforward, most

to his naked leg and foot, exclaimed-"Look there! -it is to her false delicacy at my birth I owe that deformity; and yet, as long as I can remember, she has never ceased to taunt and reproach me with it. Even a few days before we parted, for the last time, on my leaving England, she, in one of her fits of passion, uttered an imprecation upon me, praying that I might prove as ill-formed in mind as I am in body!" His look and manner, in relating this frightful circumstance, can be conceived only by those who ever have seen him in a similar state of excitement.

cordial friends. In recalling some recollections of this period in his "Memoranda," after relating the circumstance of his being caught bathing by an English party at Sunium, he added, "This was the beginning of the most delightful acquaintance which I formed in Greece." He then went on to assure Mr. Bruce, if ever those pages should meet his eyes, that the days they had passed together at Athens were remembered by him with pleasure.

Though he occasionally made excursions through Attica and the Morea, his head-quarters were fixed at Athens, where he had taken lodgings in a Franciscan convent, and, in the intervals of his tours,

The little value he had for those relics of ancient art, in pursuit of which he saw all his classic fellow-employed himself in collecting materials for those travellers so ardent, was, like every thing he ever notices on the state of modern Greece which he has thought or felt, unreservedly avowed by him. Lord appended to the second canto of Childe Harold. Sligo having it in contemplation to expend some In this retreat also, as if in utter defiance of the money in digging for antiquities, Lord Byron, in" genius loci," he wrote his "Hints from Horace;" offering to act as his agent, and to see the money at a satire which, impregnated as it is with London least honestly applied, said "You may safely life from beginning to end, bears the date, "Athens, trust me ;—I am no Dilettante. Your connoisseurs Capuchin Convent, March 12, 1811.” are all thieves ;-but I care too little for these things ever to steal them."

The system of thinning himself, which he had begun before he left England, was continued still more rigidly abroad. While at Athens, he took the hot bath for this purpose three times a-week; his usual drink being vinegar and water, and his food seldom more than a little rice.

The voyage to Egypt, which he had contemplated, was, probably for want of expected remittances, relinquished; and on the 3d of June he set sail from Malta, in the Volage frigate, for England, having, during his short stay at Malta, suffered a severe attack of the tertian fever.

Immediately on Lord Byron's arrival in London, Mr. Dallas called upon him. "On the 15th of July," Among the persons, besides Lord Sligo, whom he says this gentleman, "I had the pleasure of shaking saw most of at this time, were Lady Hester Stan-hands with him at Reddish's Hotel in St. James'shope and Mr. Bruce. One of the first objects, in-street. I thought his looks belied the report he deed, that met the eyes of these two distinguished had given me of his bodily health, and his countetravellers, on their approaching the coast of Attica, nance did not betoken melancholy, or displeasure was Lord Byron, disporting in his favourite ele-at his return. He was very animated in the account ment, under the rocks of Cape Colonna. They were afterwards made acquainted with each other by Lord Sligo, and it was in the course, I believe, of their first interview, at his table, that Lady Hester, with that lively eloquence for which she is so remarkable, took the poet briskly to task for the depreciating opinion which, as she understood, he entertained of all female intellect. Being but little inclined, were he even able, to sustain such a heresy, against one who was in her own person such an irresistible refutation of it, Lord Byron had no other refuge from the fair orator's arguments than in assent and silence; and this well-bred deference

of his travels, but assured me he had never had the least idea of writing them. He said he believed satire to be his forte, and to that he had adhered, having written, during his stay at different places abroad, a Paraphrase of Horace's Art of Poetry, which would be a good finish to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." He seemed to promise himself additional fame from it, and I undertook to superintend its publication, as I had done that of the Satire. I had chosen the time ill for my visit, and we had hardly any time to converse uninterruptedly; he therefore engaged me to breakfast with him next morning."

In the interval, Mr. Dallas looked over this Para- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'It was any thing but phrase, which he had been permitted by Lord Byron poetry-it had been condemned by a good criticto take home with him for the purpose, and his had I not myself seen the sentences on the mardisappointment was, as he himself describes it, gins of the manuscript ?' He dwelt upon the Para"grievous," on finding that a pilgrimage of two phrase of the Art of Poetry with pleasure, and the years to the inspiring lands of the East had been manuscript of that was given to Cawthorn, the pubattended with no richer poetical result. On their lisher of the Satire, to be brought forth without meeting again next morning, though unwilling to delay. I did not, however, leave him so before I speak disparagingly of the work, he could not re- quitted him I returned to the charge, and told him frain, as he informs us, from expressing some sur-that I was so convinced of the merit of Childe Haprise that his noble friend should have produced rold's Pilgrimage, that, as he had given it to me, I nothing else during his absence. "Upon this," he should certainly publish it, if he would have the continues, "Lord Byron told me that he had occa-kindness to attend to some corrections and alterasionally written short poems, besides a great many tions." stanzas in Spenser's measure, relative to the countries he had visited. They are not worth troubling you with, but you shall have them all with you, if you like.' So came I by Childe Harold's Pilgrim-Byron now persisted in his original purpose of age. He took it from a small trunk, with a number of verses. He said they had been read but by one person, who had found very little to commend, and much to condemn that he himself was of that opinion, and he was sure I should be so too. Such as it was, however, it was at my service: but he was urgent that 'The Hints from Horace' should be immediately put in train—which I promised to have done."

In tracing the fortunes of men, it is not a little curious to observe how often the course of a whole life has depended on one single step. Had Lord

giving this Poem to the press instead of Childe Harold, it is more than probable that he would have been lost, as a great poet, to the world. Happily, the better judgment of his friends averted such a risk; and he, at length, consented to the immediate publication of Childe Harold, still, however, to the last, expressing his doubts of its merits, and his alarm at the sort of reception it might meet with in the world.

The value of the treasure thus presented to him, The publication being now determined upon, Mr. Dallas was not slow in discovering. That very there arose some doubts and difficulty as to a pubevening he dispatched a letter to his noble friend, lisher. At length Mr. Murray, who at this period saying "You have written one of the most delight-resided in Fleet-street, having, some time before, ful poems I ever read. If I wrote this in flattery, I expressed a desire to be allowed to publish some 1 should deserve your contempt rather than your work of Lord Byron, it was in his hands that Mr. friendship. I have been so fascinated with Childe Dallas now placed the manuscript of Childe Harold. Harold that I have not been able to lay it down. While thus busily engaged in his literary proI would almost pledge my life on its advancing the jects, and having, besides, some law affairs to transreputation of your poetical powers, and on its act with his agent, he was called suddenly away to gaining you great honour and regard, if you will Newstead, by the intelligence of his mother's illness; do me the credit and favour of attending to my an event which seems to have affected his mind far suggestions respecting," etc. etc. etc. more deeply than, considering all the circumstances of the case, could have been expected. Mrs. Byron, whose excessive corpulence rendered her, at all times, rather a perilous subject for illness, had been of late indisposed, but not to any alarming degree; on his going abroad, she had conceived a sort of superstitious fancy that she should never see him again; and when he returned, safe and well, and wrote to inform her that he should soon see her at Newstead, she said to her waiting-woman, "If I should be dead before Byron comes down,

Notwithstanding this just praise, and the secret echo it must have found in a heart so awake to the slightest whisper of fame, it was some time before Lord Byron's obstinate repugnance to the idea of publishing Childe Harold could be removed.

"Attentive," says Mr. Dallas, " as he had hitherto been to my opinions and suggestions, and natural as it was that he should be swayed by such decided praise, I was surprised to find that I could not at first obtain credit with him for my judgment on