"I had not, as you have seen, witnessed the distressing part of this adventure myself; but from the lively picture drawn of it by my friend, and from the exaggerated descriptions of George, I fancied myself a good judge of the whole situation, and should consider this to have been one of the most considerable of the few adventures that befell either of us during our tour in Turkey. It was long before we ceased to talk of the thunder-storm in the plain of Zitza."
[131] Mr. Hobhouse. I think, makes the number of this guard but thirty-seven, and Lord Byron, in a subsequent letter, rates them at forty.
"Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer's eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!"
Childe Harold, Canto I.
[133] The passage of Harris, indeed, contains the pith of the whole stanza:—"Notwithstanding the various fortune of Athens, as a city, Attica is still famous for olives, and Mount Hymettus for honey. Human institutions perish, but Nature is permanent."—Philolog. Inquiries.—I recollect having once pointed out this coincidence to Lord Byron, but he assured me that he had never even seen this work of Harris.
[134] Travels in Italy, Greece, &c., by H. W. Williams, Esq.
[135] The Miscellany, to which I have more than once referred.
[136] He has adopted this name in his description of the Seraglio in Don Juan, Canto VI. It was, if I recollect right, in making love to one of these girls that he had recourse to an act of courtship often practised in that country,—namely, giving himself a wound across the breast with his dagger. The young Athenian, by his own account, looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no degree moved to gratitude.
[137] Among others, he mentions his passage of the Tagus in 1809, which is thus described by Mr. Hobhouse:—"My companion had before made a more perilous, but less celebrated, passage; for I recollect that, when we were in Portugal, he swam from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, and having to contend with a tide and counter current, the wind blowing freshly, was but little less than two hours in crossing the river." In swimming from Sestos to Abydos, he was one hour and ten minutes in the water.