One episode of these foreign experiences deserves a separate notice. In 1832 Milnes spent some months in Greece with his friend Mr Christopher Wordsworth, a scholar whose _Athens and Attica_ has long been a classical text-book. But Milnes was more powerfully attracted by the sight of Grecian independence than by the relics of her ancient glory. The volume which he published on his return, called _Memorials of a Tour in some parts of Greece, chiefly Poetical_ (his first independent literary venture, it may be remarked), contains but scanty references to antiquity. He was keenly interested in the efforts of Greece to obtain a settled government of her own, and through all the drawbacks and discomforts which, as a traveller, he had to endure from the Greeks, he firmly adhered to the cause of freedom. He even advocated the immediate restoration of the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon. But Milnes had a mind which was singularly free from prejudice, and even in those early days he had learnt to consider both sides of every question, and to keep his sympathies controlled by his judgment. He probably approached Greece with the enthusiasm for a liberated nation which had so deeply stirred even the most indifferent in England; but he left it ‘with an affection for the Turkish character which he never entirely lost, and which enabled him in very different days, then far distant, to understand the political exigencies of the East better than many politicians of more pretentious character and fame.’