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.