For boyish minions of unhallowed love
The shameless torch of wild desire is lit,
Caressed, preferred even to woman's self above,
Whose forms for Nature's gentler errors fit
All frailties mote excuse save that which they commit.—[MS. D. erased.]
[160] [For an account of Ali Pasha (1741-1822), see Letters, 1898, i. 246, note.]
[161] [In a letter to his mother, November 12, 1809, Byron writes, "He [Ali] 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 and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats, twenty times a day." Many years after, in the first letter On Bowles' Strictures, February 7, 1821, he introduces a reminiscence of Ali: "I never judge from manners, for I once had my pocket picked by the civillest gentleman I ever met with; and one of the mildest persons I ever saw was Ali Pasha" (Life, p. 689).]
[fi] [{139}] Delights to mingle with the lips of youth.—[MS. D. erased.]
[162] [Anacreon sometimes bewails, but more often defies old age. (Vide Carmina liv., xi., xxxiv.)
The paraphrase "Teian Muse" recurs in the song, "The Isles of Greece," Don Juan, Canto III.]
[fj] But 'tis those ne'er forgotten acts of ruth.—[MS. D.]
[163] [In the first edition the reading (see [var. ii.]) is, "But crimes, those ne'er forgotten crimes of ruth." The mistake was pointed out in the Quarterly Review (March, 1812, No. 13, vol. vii. p. 193).
But in Spenser "ruth" means sorrow as well as pity, and three weeks after Childe Harold was published, Ali committed a terrible crime, the outcome of an early grief. On March 27, 1812, in revenge for wrongs done to his mother and sister nearly thirty years before, he caused 670 Gardhikiots to be massacred in the khan of Valiare, and followed up the act of treachery by sacking, plundering, and burning the town of Gardiki, and, "in direct violation of the Mohammedan law," carrying off and reducing to slavery the women and children.—Finlay's Hist. of Greece (edited by Rev. H. F. Tozer, 1877), vi. 67, 68.]