In pursuance of the plan which he had traced out for himself previous to leaving France, he examined with scrupulous care all the fragments and ruins within the scope of his researches. After touching on the southern coast of the Morea, and sketching the castle of Coron, with various Albanian soldiers whom he met with on the shore, he proceeded to the isles,--Milo, Siphanto, Naxia, Delos, where the wrecks of antiquity and the grotesque costume and manners of modern times exercised his elegant pencil and pen. Those persons who have visited countries where the ruins of former ages eclipse, as it were, the stunted heirs of the soil, will comprehend the difficulty of attending, amid monuments rendered doubly sublime by decay, to the rude attempts at architecture and the undignified circumstances which mark the existence of a population relapsed into ignorance. To these, however, Choiseul-Gouffier was by no means inattentive. He sketched, and it would seem with equal complacency, the ruins of some venerable temple and the beautiful dark-eyed girl of the Ionian Islands, plaiting her tresses, or sporting with her fat, long-haired Angola. In sketching the life of this traveller, I must beware that I am not carried away by classical recollections. Here, where Not a mountain rears its head unsung, it might, perhaps, be pleasing to a certain variety of minds to expatiate at leisure over the immortal fields of fable, and the scenes of actions which man is still proud to have performed; and if I abstain from entering upon the subject, it is not from any indifference to its charms, or that I want faith in its powers to produce, if properly handled, the same effect upon others which it has long exercised over me. But this is not the place to indulge in themes of this kind. Biography rejects all pictures of such a description, and requires narrative; and accordingly I proceed with the history of our traveller’s labours.