The landing-place in the port of Zea, I recollect distinctly.  The port itself is a small land-locked gulf, or, as the Scottish Highlander would call it, a loch.  The banks are rocky and forbidding; the hills, which rise to the altitude of mountains, have, in a long course of ages, been always inhabited by a civilized people.  Their precipitous sides are formed into innumerable artificial terraces, the aspect of which, austere, ruinous, and ancient, produces on the mind of the stranger a sense of the presence of a greater antiquity than the sight of monuments of mere labour and art.  The town stands high upon the mountain, I counted on the lower side of the road which leads to it forty-nine of those terraces at one place under me, and on the opposite hills, in several places, upwards of sixty.  Whether Lord Byron ascended to the town is doubtful.  I have never heard him mention that he had; and I am inclined to think that he proceeded at once to Athens by one of the boats which frequent the harbour.

At Athens he met an old fellow-collegian, the Marquis of Sligo, with whom he soon after travelled as far as Corinth; the Marquis turning off there for Tripolizza, while Byron went forward to Patras, where he had some needful business to transact with the consul.  He then made the tour of the Morea, in the course of which he visited the Vizier Velhi Pasha, by whom he was treated, as every other English traveller of the time was, with great distinction and hospitality.

Having occasion to go back to Patras, he was seized by the local fever there, and reduced to death’s door.  On his recovery he returned to Athens, where he found the Marquis, with Lady Hester Stanhope, and Mr Bruce, afterward so celebrated for his adventures in assisting the escape of the French General Lavalette.  He took possession of the apartments which I had occupied in the monastery, and made them his home during the remainder of his residence in Greece; but when I returned to Athens, in October, he was not there himself.  I found, however, his valet, Fletcher, in possession.

There is no very clear account of the manner in which Lord Byron employed himself after his return to Athens; but various intimations in his correspondence show that during the winter his pen was not idle.  It would, however, be to neglect an important occurrence, not to notice that during the time when he was at Athens alone, the incident which he afterwards embodied in the impassioned fragments of The Giaour came to pass; and to apprise the reader that the story is founded on an adventure which happened to himself—­he was, in fact, the cause of the girl being condemned, and ordered to be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the sea.