Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past
   Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied throng;
   Long shall the voyager, with th’ Ionian blast,
   Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;
   Long shall thy annals and immortal tongue
   Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore;
   Boast of the aged! lesson of the young! 
   Which sages venerate and bards adore,
As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore!

Of the existing race of Athenians Byron has observed, that they are remarkable for their cunning:  “Among the various foreigners resident in Athens there was never a difference of opinion in their estimate of the Greek character, though on all other topics they disputed with great acrimony.  M. Fauvel, the French consul, who has passed thirty years at Athens, frequently declared in my hearing, that the Greeks do not deserve to be emancipated, reasoning on the ground of their national and individual depravity—­while he forgot that such depravity is to be attributed to causes which can only be removed by the measures he reprobates.

“M.  Roque, a French merchant of respectability long settled in Athens, asserted with the most amusing gravity, ’Sir, they are the same canaille that existed in the days of Themistocles.’  The ancients banished Themistocles; the moderns cheat Monsieur Roque:  thus great men have ever been treated.

“In short, all the Franks who are fixtures, and most of the Englishmen, Germans, Danes, etc., of passage, came over by degrees to their opinion, on much the same grounds that a Turk in England would condemn the nation by wholesale, because he was wronged by his lackey and overcharged by his washerwoman.  Certainly, it was not a little staggering when the Sieurs Fauvel and Lusieri, the two greatest demagogues of the day, who divide between them the power of Pericles and the popularity of Cleon, and puzzle the poor Waywode with perpetual differences, agreed in the utter condemnation of the Greeks in general, and of the Athenians in particular.”

I have quoted his Lordship thus particularly because after his arrival at Athens he laid down his pen.  Childe Harold there disappears.  Whether he had written the pilgrimage up to that point at Athens I have not been able to ascertain; while I am inclined to think it was so, as I recollect he told me there that he had then described or was describing the reception he had met with at Tepellene from Ali Pasha.

After having halted some time at Athens, where they established their headquarters, the travellers, when they had inspected the principal antiquities of the city (those things which all travellers must visit), made several excursions into the environs, and among other places went to Eleusis.