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