Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he describes as “full of Quakers and salt fish,” he despatched letters to his mother, Drury, and Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods of his mind.  Smarting under a slight he had received at parting from a school-companion, who had excused himself from a farewell meeting on the plea that he had to go shopping, he at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, “leaving England without regret,” he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of boisterous buffoonery.  On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month, when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus.  The poet in some of his stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political assassinations.  Nothing else remains of his sojourn to interest us, save the statement of Mr. Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous, though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, Byron praises the neighbouring Cintra, as “the most beautiful village in the world,” though he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English had any books in their country.  Despatching his baggage and servants by sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend started on horseback through the south-west of Spain.  Their first resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles, performed at an average rate of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was Seville, where they lodged for three days in the house of two ladies, to whose attractions, as well as the fascination he seems to have exerted over them, the poet somewhat garrulously refers.  Here, too, he saw, parading on the Prado, the famous Maid of Saragossa, whom he celebrates in his equally famous stanzas (Childe Harold, I., 54-58).  Of Cadiz, the next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, describing the bull fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing prose.  The belles of this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches of Spain; and by reason of them, rather than the sea-shore or the Sierra Morena, “sweet Cadiz is the first spot in the creation.”  Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to Gibraltar, for which place he has nothing but curses.  Byron had no sympathy with the ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great struggle with the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to have sympathized with Napoleon.

The ship stopped at Cagliari in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti on the Sicilian coast.  Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three weeks—­time enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, flirtation with Mrs. Spencer Smith, wife of our minister at Constantinople, sister-in-law of the famous admiral, and the heroine of some exciting adventures.  She is the “Florence” of Childe Harold, and is afterwards addressed in some of the most graceful verses of his cavalier minstrelsy—­