The disciples of Munchausen, who delight in showing Byron’s verse to be only biography, have found a rich field in that two years’ travel.  One man really did a brilliant thing—­in three volumes—­recounting the conquering march of the poet, whom he depicts as a combination of Don Juan and Rob Roy.

The probabilities are that the real facts, not illumined by fancy, would be a tale with which to conjure sleep.  Foreign travel is hard work.  It constitutes the final test of friendship, and to make the tour of Europe with a man and not hate him marks one or both of the parties as seraphic in quality.  The best of travel is in looking back upon it from the dreamy quiet and rest of home—­laughing at the things that once rasped your nerves, and enjoying, through recollection, the scenes you only glanced at wearily.

Two instances of that trip—­when Hobhouse threatened to desert the party and was dared to do so, and Byron slapped Fletcher’s face and got himself well kicked in return—­will suffice to show how Byron had the faculty of seizing trivial incidents, and by lifting them up and separating them from the mass, made them live as Art.

At Athens the trio made a sudden resolve to be respectable, and practise economy.  To this end they hired rooms of a worthy widow, who accommodated travelers with a transient home for a moderate stipend.  This widow had three daughters:  the eldest, Theresa by name, lives in letters as the Maid of Athens, and the glory that came to her was achieved without any special danger to either her heart or the poet’s.  The young woman, we know, assisted in the household affairs; and probably often dusted the mantel in the poet’s room while he sat smoking with one foot on the table, making irrelevant remarks to her about this or that.

Suddenly he wrote a poem, “Maid of Athens, ere we part, give, O give me back my heart.” * * *

With the genuine literary thrift that marked all of Byron’s career, he preserved a copy of the lines, and some years after recast them, touched them up a bit, included the stuff in a book—­and there you are.

The other incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body.  Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time.  He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells.  Years after he wrote thus: 

    “And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
    Hold o’er the dead their carnival;
    Gorging and growling o’er carcass and limb,
    They were too busy to bark at him. 
    From a Tartar’s skull they stripped the flesh,
    As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
    And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull,
    As it slipped through their jaws when the edge grew dull.”

And this only proves that Hobhouse was not a poet and Byron was.  The poet is never content to state the mere facts—­facts are only valuable as suggestions for poetry.