The Albanians have, like the vulgar of all countries, a species of hearth or household superstitions, distinct from their wild and imperfect religion.  They imagine that mankind, after death, become voorthoolakases, and often pay visits to their friends and foes for the same reasons, and in the same way, that our own country ghosts walk abroad; and their visiting hour is, also, midnight.  But the collyvillory is another sort of personage.  He delights in mischief and pranks, and is, besides, a lewd and foul spirit; and, therefore, very properly detested.  He is let loose on the night of the nativity, with licence for twelve nights to plague men’s wives; at which time some one of the family must keep wakeful vigil all the livelong night, beside a clear and cheerful fire, otherwise this naughty imp would pour such an aqueous stream on the hearth, that fire could never be kindled there again.

The Albanians are also pestered with another species of malignant creatures; men and women whose gifts are followed by misfortunes, whose eyes glimpse evil, and by whose touch the most prosperous affairs are blasted.  They work their malicious sorceries in the dark, collect herbs of baleful influence; by the help of which, they strike their enemies with palsy, and cattle with distemper.  The males are called maissi, and the females maissa—­witches and warlocks.

Besides these curious superstitious peculiarities, they have among them persons who pretend to know the character of approaching events by hearing sounds which resemble those that shall accompany the actual occurrence.  Having, however, given Lord Byron’s account of the adventure of his servant Dervish, at Cape Colonna, it is unnecessary to be more particular with the subject here.  Indeed, but for the great impression which everything about the Albanians made on the mind of the poet, the insertion of these memoranda would be irrelevant.  They will, however, serve to elucidate several allusions, not otherwise very clear, in those poems of which the scenes are laid in Greece; and tend, in some measure, to confirm the correctness of the opinion, that his genius is much more indebted to facts and actual adventures, than to the force of his imagination.  Many things regarded in his most original productions, as fancies and invention, may be traced to transactions in which he was himself a spectator or an actor.  The impress of experience is vivid upon them all.

CHAPTER XX

Local Pleasures—­Byron’s Grecian Poems—­His Departure from Athens—­ Description of Evening in “The Corsair”—­The Opening of “The Giaour"- -State of Patriotic Feeling then in Greece—­Smyrna—­Change in Lord Byron’s Manners

The genii that preside over famous places have less influence on the imagination than on the memory.  The pleasures enjoyed on the spot spring from the reminiscences of reading; and the subsequent enjoyment derived from having visited celebrated scenes, comes again from the remembrance of objects seen there, and the associations connected with them.