TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL.

There is no romance of Munchausen or Dumas more marvellous than the adventures attributed to Lord Byron abroad. Attached to his first expedition are a series of narratives, by professing eye-witnesses, of his intrigues, encounters, acts of diablerie and of munificence, in particular of his roaming about the isles of Greece and taking possession of one of them, which have all the same relation to reality as the Arabian Nights to the actual reign of Haroun Al Raschid.

Byron had far more than an average share of the emigre spirit, the counterpoise in the English race of their otherwise arrogant isolation. He held with Wilhelm Meister

To give space for wandering is it,
That the earth was made so wide.

and wrote to his mother from Athens: “I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind, instead of reading about them, and the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to send our young men abroad for a term, among the few allies our wars have left us.”

On June 11th, having borrowed money at heavy interest, and stored his mind with information about Persia and India, the contemplated but unattained goal of his travels, he left London, accompanied by his friend Hobhouse, Fletcher his valet, Joe Murray his old butler, and Robert Rushton the son of one of his tenants, supposed to be represented by the Page in Childe Harold. The two latter, the one on account of his age, the other from his health breaking down, he sent back to England from Gibraltar.

Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he describes as “full of Quakers and salt fish,” he despatched letters to his mother, Drury, and Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods of his mind. Smarting under a slight he had received at parting from a school-companion, who had excused himself from a farewell meeting on the plea that he had to go shopping, he at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, “leaving England without regret,” he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month, when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political assassinations. Nothing else remains of his sojourn to interest us, save the statement of Mr. Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous, though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, Byron praises the neighbouring Cintra, as “the most beautiful village in the world,” though he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English had any books in their country. Despatching his baggage and servants by sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend started on horseback through the south-west of Spain. Their first resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles, performed at an average rate of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was Seville, where they lodged for three days in the house of two ladies, to whose attractions, as well as the fascination he seems to have exerted over them, the poet somewhat garrulously refers. Here, too, he saw, parading on the Prado, the famous Maid of Saragossa, whom he celebrates in his equally famous stanzas (Childe Harold, I., 54-58). Of Cadiz, the next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, describing the bull fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing prose. The belles of this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches of Spain; and by reason of them, rather than the sea-shore or the Sierra Morena, “sweet Cadiz is the first spot in the creation.” Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to Gibraltar, for which place he has nothing but curses. Byron had no sympathy with the ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great struggle with the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to have sympathized with Napoleon.

The ship stopped at Cagliari in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti on the Sicilian coast. Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three weeks time enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, flirtation with Mrs. Spencer Smith, wife of our minister at Constantinople, sister-in-law of the famous admiral, and the heroine of some exciting adventures. She is the “Florence” of Childe Harold, and is afterwards addressed in some of the most graceful verses of his cavalier minstrelsy

Do thou, amidst the fair white walls,
If Cadiz yet be free,
At times from out her latticed halls
Look o’er the dark blue sea
Then think upon Calypso’s isles,
Endear’d by days gone by,
To others give a thousand smiles,
To me a single sigh.

The only other adventure of the visit is Byron’s quarrel with an officer, on some unrecorded ground, which Hobhouse tells us nearly resulted in a duel. The friends left Malta on September 29th, in the war-ship “Spider,” and after anchoring off Patras, and spending a few hours on shore, they skirted the coast of Acarnania, in view of localities as Ithaca, the Leucadian rock, and Actium whose classic memories filtered through the poet’s mind and found a place in his masterpieces. Landing at Previsa, they started on a tour through Albania,

O’er many a mount sublime,
Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales.

Byron was deeply impressed by the beauty of the scenery, and the half-savage independence of the people, described as “always strutting about with slow dignity, though in rags.” In October we find him with his companions at Janina, hospitably entertained by order of Ali Pasha, the famous Albanian Turk, bandit, and despot, then besieging Ibrahim at Berat in Illyria. They proceeded on their way by “bleak Pindus,” Acherusia’s lake, and Zitza, with its monastery door battered by robbers. Before reaching the latter place, they encountered a terrific thunderstorm, in the midst of which they separated, and Byron’s detachment lost its way for nine hours, during which he composed the verses to Florence, quoted above.

Some days later they together arrived at Tepaleni, and were there received by Ali Pasha in person. The scene on entering the town is described as recalling Scott’s Branksome Castle and the feudal system; and the introduction to Ali, who sat for some of the traits of the poet’s corsairs, is graphically reproduced in a letter to Mrs. Byron. “His first question was, why at so early an age I left my country, and without a ‘lala,’ or nurse? He then said the English minister had told him I was of a great family, and desired his respects to my mother, which I now present to you (date, November 12th). He said he was certain I was a man of birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands. 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, fruit, and sweetmeats, twenty times a day.” Byron shortly afterwards discovered his host to be, a poisoner and an assassin. “Two days ago,” he proceeds in a passage which illustrates his character and a common experience, “I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship-of-war, owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew. Fletcher yelled after his wife; the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmen on Alla; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God. The sails were split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in; and all our chance was to make for Corfu or, as F. pathetically called it, ‘a watery grave.’ I did what I could to console him, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself in my Albanian capote, and lay down on the deck to wait the worst.” Unable from his lameness, says Hobhouse, to be of any assistance, he in a short time was found amid the trembling sailors, fast asleep. They got back to the coast of Suli, and shortly afterwards started through Acarnania and AEtolia for the Morea, again rejoicing in the wild scenery and the apparently kindred spirits of the wild men among whom they passed. Byron was especially fascinated by the firelight dance and song of the robber band, which he describes and reproduces in Childe Harold. On the 21st of November he reached Mesolonghi, whore, fifteen years later, he died. Here he dismissed most of his escort, proceeded to Patras, and on to Vostizza, caught sight of Parnassus, and accepted a flight of eagles near Delphi as a favouring sign of Apollo. “The last bird,” he writes, “I ever fired at was an eaglet on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto. It was only wounded and I tried to save it the eye was so bright. But it pined and died in a few days: and I never did since, and never will, attempt the life of another bird.” From Livadia the travellers proceeded to Thebes, visited the cave of Trophonius, Diana’s fountain, the so-called ruins of Pindar’s house, and the field of Cheronea, crossed Cithaeron, and on Christmas, 1809, arrived before the defile, near the ruins of Phyle, where, he had his first glimpse of Athens, which evoked the famous lines:

Ancient of days, august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.
First in the race that led to glory’s goal,
They won, and pass’d away: is this the whole
A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour?

After which he reverts to his perpetually recurring moral, “Men come and go; but the hills, and waves, and skies, and stars, endure”

Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds;
Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
Art, glory, freedom fail but nature still is fair.

The duration of Lord Byron’s first visit to Athens was about three months, and it was varied by excursions to different parts of Attica; Eleusis, Hymettus, Cape Colonna, (Sunium, the scene of Falconer’s shipwreck), the Colonus of OEdipus, and Marathon, the plain of which is said to have been placed at his disposal for about the same sum that, thirty years later, an American offered to give for the bark with the poet’s name on the tree at Newstead. Byron had a poor opinion of the modern Athenians, who seem to have at this period done their best to justify the Roman satirist. He found them superficial, cunning, and false; but, with generous historic insight, he says that no nation in like circumstances would have been much better; that they had the vices of ages of slavery, from which it would require ages of freedom to emancipate them.

In the Greek capital he lodged at the house of a respectable lady, widow of an English vice-consul, who had three daughters, the eldest of whom, Theresa, acquired an innocent and enviable fame as the Maid of Athens, without the dangerous glory of having taken any very firm hold of the heart that she was asked to return. A more solid passion was the poet’s genuine indignation on the “lifting,” in Border phrase, of the marbles from the Parthenon, and their being taken to England by order of Lord Elgin. Byron never wrote anything more sincere than the Curse of Minerva; and he has recorded few incidents more pathetic than that of the old Greek who, when the last stone was removed for exportation, shed tears, and said “[Greek: telos]!” The question is still an open one of ethics. There are few Englishmen of the higher rank who do not hold London in the right hand as barely balanced by the rest of the world in the left; a judgment in which we can hardly expect Romans, Parisians, and Athenians to concur. On the other hand, the marbles were mouldering at Athens, and they are preserved, like ginger, in the British Museum.

Among the adventures of this period are an expedition across the Ilissus to some caves near Kharyati, in which the travellers were by accident nearly entombed; another to Pentelicus, where they tried to carve their names on the marble rock; and a third to the environs of the Piraeus in the evening light. Early in March the convenient departure of an English sloop-of-war induced them to make an excursion to Smyrna. There, on the 28th of March, the second canto of Childe Harold, begun in the previous autumn at Janina, was completed. They remained in the neighbourhood, visiting Ephesus, without poetical result further than a reference to the jackals, in the Siege of Corinth; and on April 11th left by the “Salsette,” a frigate on its way to Constantinople. The vessel touched at the Troad, and Byron spent some time on land, snipe-shooting, and rambling among the reputed ruins of Ilium. The poet characteristically, in Don Juan and elsewhere, attacks the sceptics, and then half ridicules the belief.

I’ve stood upon Achilles’ tomb,
And heard Troy doubted! Time will doubt of Rome!

There, on the green and village-cotted hill, is,
Flank’d by the Hellespont, and by the sea,
Entomb’d the bravest of the brave Achilles.
They say so: Bryant says the contrary.

Being again detained in the Dardanelles, waiting for a fair wind, Byron landed on the European side, and swam, in company with Lieutenant Ekenhead, from Sestos to Abydos a performance of which he boasts some twenty times. The strength of the current is the main difficulty of a feat, since so surpassed as to have passed from notice; but it was a tempting theme for classical allusions. At length, on May 14, he reached Constantinople, exalted the Golden Horn above all the sights he had seen, and now first abandoned his design of travelling to Persia. Galt, and other more or less gossiping travellers, have accumulated a number of incidents of the poet’s life at this period, of his fanciful dress, blazing in scarlet and gold, and of his sometimes absurd contentions for the privileges of rank as when he demanded precedence of the English ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its refusal, could only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian internuncio. In converse with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down, by which he frequently gave offence. More interesting are narratives of the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in Don Juan, and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the Bride of Abydos. One example is, if we except Dante’s Ugolino, the most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the weakening, of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse’s plain prose: “The sensations produced by the state of the weather” it was wretched and stormy when they left the “Salsette” for the city “and leaving a comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when, passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body.” After this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination brooding over the incident,

And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o’er the dead their carnival:
Gorging and growling o’er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar’s skull they had stripp’d the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch’d on the whiter skull,
As it slipp’d through their jaws when their edge grow dull.

No one ever more persistently converted the incidents of travel into poetic material; but sometimes in doing so he borrowed more largely from his imagination than his memory, as in the description of the seraglio, of which there is reason to doubt his having seen more than the entrance.

Byron and Hobhouse set sail from Constantinople on the 14th July, 1810 the latter to return direct to England, a determination which, from no apparent fault on either side, the former did not regret. One incident of the passage derives interest from its possible consequence. Taking up, and unsheathing, a yataghan which he found on the quarter deck, ho remarked, “I should like to know how a person feels after committing a murder.” This harmless piece of melodrama the idea of which is expanded in Mr. Dobell’s Balder, and parodied in Firmilian may have been the basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by Goethe, that his lordship had committed a murder; hence, obviously, the character of Lara, and the mystery of Manfred! The poet parted from his friend at Zea, (Ceos): after spending some time in solitude on the little island, he returned to Athens, and there renewed acquaintance with his school friend, the Marquis of Sligo, who after a few days accompanied him to Corinth. They then separated, and Byron went on to Patras in the Morea, where he had business with the Consul. He dates from there at the close of July. It is impossible to give a consecutive account of his life during the next ten months, a period consequently filled up with the contradictory and absurd mass of legends before referred to. A few facts only of any interest are extricable. During at least half of the time his head-quarters were at Athens, where he again met his friend the Marquis, associated with the English Consul and Lady Hester Stanhope, studied Romaic in a Franciscan monastery where he saw and conversed with a motley crew of French, Italians, Danes, Greeks, Turks, and Americans, wrote to his mother and others, saying he had swum from Sestos to Abydos, was sick of Fletcher bawling for beef and beer, had done with authorship, and hoped on his return to lead a quiet recluse life. He nevertheless made notes to Harold, composed the Hints from Horace and the Curse of Minerva, and presumably brooded over, and outlined in his mind, many of his verse romances. We hear no more of the, Maid of Athens, but there is no fair ground to doubt that the Giaour was suggested by his rescue of a young woman whom, for the fault of an amour with some Frank, a party of Janissaries were about to throw, sewn up in a sack, into the sea. Mr. Galt gives no authority for his statement, that the girl’s deliverer was the original cause of her sentence. We may rest assured that if it had been so, Byron himself would have told us of it.

A note to the Siege of Corinth is suggestive of his unequalled restlessness. “I visited all three Tripolitza, Napoli, and Argos in 1810-11; and in the course of journeying through the country, from my first arrival in 1809, crossed the Isthmus eight times on my way from Attica to the Morea.” In the latter locality we find him during the autumn the honoured guest of the Vizier Valhi (a son of Ali Pasha), who presented him with a fine horse. During a second visit to Patras, in September, he was attacked by the same sort of marsh fever from which, fourteen years afterwards, in the near neighbourhood, he died. On his recovery, in October, he complains of having been nearly killed by the heroic measures of the native doctors: “One of them trusts to his genius, never having studied; the other, to a campaign of eighteen months against the sick of Otranto, which he made in his youth with great effect. When I was seized with my disorder, I protested against both these assassins, but in vain.” He was saved by the zeal of his servants, who asseverated that if his lordship died they would take good care the doctors should also; on which the learned men discontinued their visits, and the patient revived. On his final return to Athens, the restoration of his health was retarded by one of his long courses of reducing diet; he lived mainly on rice, and vinegar and water. From that city he writes in the early spring, intimating his intention of proceeding to Egypt; but Mr. Hanson, his man of business, ceasing to send him remittances, the scheme was abandoned. Beset by letters about his debts, he again declares his determination to hold fast by Newstead, adding that if the place which is his only tie to England is sold, he won’t come back at all. Life on the shores of the Archipelago is far cheaper and happier, and “Ubi bene ibi patria,” for such a citizen of the world as he has become. Later he went to Malta, and was detained there by another bad attack of tertian fever. The next record of consequence is from the “Volage” frigate, at sea, June 29, 1811, when he writes in a despondent strain to Hodgson, that he is returning home “without a hope, and almost without a desire,” to wrangle with creditors and lawyers about executions and coal pits. “In short, I am sick and sorry; and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence. I am sick of fops, and poesy, and prate, and shall leave the whole Castalian state to Bufo, or anybody else. Howbeit, I have written some 4000 lines, of one kind or another, on my travels.” With these, and a collection of marbles, and skulls, and hemlock, and tortoises, and servants, he reached London about the middle of July, and remained there, making some arrangements about business and publication. On the 23rd we have a short but kind letter to his mother, promising to pay her a visit on his way to Rochdale. “You know you are a vixen, but keep some champagne for me,” he had written from abroad. On receipt of the letter she remarked, “If I should be dead before he comes down, what a strange thing it, would be.” Towards the close of the month she had an attack so alarming that he was summoned; but before, he had time to arrive she had expired, on the 1st of August, in a fit of rage brought on by reading an upholsterer’s bill. On the way Byron heard the intelligence, and wrote to Dr. Pigot: “I now feel the truth of Gray’s observation, that we can only have one mother. Peace be with her!” On arriving at Newstead, all their storms forgotten, the son was so affected that he did not trust himself to go to the funeral, but stood dreamily gazing at the cortege from the gate of the Abbey. Five days later, Charles S. Matthews was drowned.