call on God.  The sails were split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in; and all our chance was to make for Corfu—­or, as F. pathetically called it, ‘a watery grave.’  I did what I could to console him, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself in my Albanian capote, and lay down on the deck to wait the worst.”  Unable from his lameness, says Hobhouse, to be of any assistance, he in a short time was found amid the trembling sailors, fast asleep.  They got back to the coast of Suli, and shortly afterwards started through Acarnania and AEtolia for the Morea, again rejoicing in the wild scenery and the apparently kindred spirits of the wild men among whom they passed.  Byron was especially fascinated by the firelight dance and song of the robber band, which he describes and reproduces in Childe Harold.  On the 21st of November he reached Mesolonghi, whore, fifteen years later, he died.  Here he dismissed most of his escort, proceeded to Patras, and on to Vostizza, caught sight of Parnassus, and accepted a flight of eagles near Delphi as a favouring sign of Apollo.  “The last bird,” he writes, “I ever fired at was an eaglet on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto.  It was only wounded and I tried to save it—­the eye was so bright.  But it pined and died in a few days:  and I never did since, and never will, attempt the life of another bird.”  From Livadia the travellers proceeded to Thebes, visited the cave of Trophonius, Diana’s fountain, the so-called ruins of Pindar’s house, and the field of Cheronea, crossed Cithaeron, and on Christmas, 1809, arrived before the defile, near the ruins of Phyle, where, he had his first glimpse of Athens, which evoked the famous lines:—­

  Ancient of days, august Athena! where,
  Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? 
  Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were. 
  First in the race that led to glory’s goal,
  They won, and pass’d away:  is this the whole—­
  A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour?

After which he reverts to his perpetually recurring moral, “Men come and go; but the hills, and waves, and skies, and stars, endure”—­

  Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds;
  Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
  Art, glory, freedom fail—­but nature still is fair.

The duration of Lord Byron’s first visit to Athens was about three months, and it was varied by excursions to different parts of Attica; Eleusis, Hymettus, Cape Colonna, (Sunium, the scene of Falconer’s shipwreck), the Colonus of OEdipus, and Marathon, the plain of which is said to have been placed at his disposal for about the same sum that, thirty years later, an American offered to give for the bark with the poet’s name on the tree at Newstead.  Byron had a poor opinion of the modern Athenians, who seem to have at this period done their best to justify the Roman satirist.  He found them superficial, cunning, and false; but, with generous historic insight, he says that no nation in like circumstances would have been much better; that they had the vices of ages of slavery, from which it would require ages of freedom to emancipate them.