The efforts of the British Ambassador became the more timely and imperative from the fact that no amount of experience or warning was sufficient to deter the Turks from their favourite practice of converting the finest of the Greek Temples into powder magazines. Twenty of the metopes of the northern side of the Parthenon had been, in consequence of this practice, destroyed by an explosion during the Venetian siege of Athens in the seventeenth century. [Sidenote: 1800.] The Temple of Neptune was found by Lord ELGIN devoted to the same use, at the beginning of the nineteenth. No methods of extending his researches, so as to make them as nearly exhaustive as the circumstances would admit, were overlooked by the ambassador. Through the friendship of the Capitan Pasha, Lord ELGIN had already, whilst yet at the Dardanelles, obtained the famous Boustrophedon inscription from Cape Sigæum. Through the friendship of the Archbishop of Athens, he now procured leave to search the churches and convents of Attica, and the search led to his possession of many of the minor but very interesting works of sculpture and architecture which came eventually to England along with the marbles of the Parthenon. Of the curious range and variety of the dangers to which the remains of ancient art were exposed under Turkish rule, the Boustrophedon inscription just mentioned affords an instance worth noting. [Sidenote: _Memoranda on the Earl of Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece, &c._, p. 35.] Lord ELGIN found it in use as a seat, or couch, at the door of a Greek chapel, to which persons afflicted with ague or rheumatism were in the habit of resorting, in order to recline on this marble, which, in their eyes, possessed a mysterious and curative virtue. The seat was so placed as to lift the patient into a much purer air than that which he had been wont to breathe below, and it commanded a most cheerful sea-view; but it was the ill fate of the inscription to have a magical fame, instead of the atmosphere. Constant rubbing had already half obliterated its contents. But for Lord ELGIN, the whole would soon have disappeared. At Athens itself, the loftier of the sculptures in the Acropolis enjoyed equal favour in the eyes of Turkish marksmen, as affording excellent targets. In the course of various excavations made, not only at Athens, but at Æginæ, Argos, and Corinth, a large collection of vases was also formed. It was the first collection which sufficed, incontestibly, to vindicate the claim of the Greeks to the invention of that beautiful ware, to which the name of ‘Etruscan’ was so long and so inaccurately given. [Sidenote: _Ibid._, 31.]