What can you have done to share the wrath which has heretofore been principally expended upon the Prince?  I presume all your Scribleri will be drawn up in battle array in defence of the modern Tonson—­Mr. Bucke, for instance.

     “Send in my account to Bennet Street, as I wish to settle it before
     sailing.”

[Footnote 62:  Lady Charlotte Harley, to whom, under the name of Ianthe, the introductory lines to Childe Harold were afterwards addressed.]

* * * * *

In the month of May appeared his wild and beautiful “Fragment,” The Giaour;—­and though, in its first flight from his hands, some of the fairest feathers of its wing were yet wanting, the public hailed this new offspring of his genius with wonder and delight.  The idea of writing a poem in fragments had been suggested to him by the Columbus of Mr. Rogers; and, whatever objections may lie against such a plan in general, it must be allowed to have been well suited to the impatient temperament of Byron, as enabling him to overleap those mechanical difficulties, which, in a regular narrative, embarrass, if not chill, the poet,—­leaving it to the imagination of his readers to fill up the intervals between those abrupt bursts of passion in which his chief power lay.  The story, too, of the poem possessed that stimulating charm for him, almost indispensable to his fancy, of being in some degree connected with himself,—­an event in which he had been personally concerned, while on his travels, having supplied the groundwork on which the fiction was founded.  After the appearance of The Giaour, some incorrect statement of this romantic incident having got into circulation, the noble author requested of his friend, the Marquis of Sligo, who had visited Athens soon after it happened, to furnish him with his recollections on the subject; and the following is the answer which Lord Sligo returned:—­

     “Albany, Monday, August 31. 1813.

     “My dear Byron,

“You have requested me to tell you all that I heard at Athens about the affair of that girl who was so near being put an end to while you were there; you have asked me to mention every circumstance, in the remotest degree relating to it, which I heard.  In compliance with your wishes, I write to you all I heard, and I cannot imagine it to be very far from the fact, as the circumstance happened only a day or two before I arrived at Athens, and, consequently, was a matter of common conversation at the time.

“The new governor, unaccustomed to have the same intercourse with the Christians as his predecessor, had of course the barbarous Turkish ideas with regard to women.  In consequence, and in compliance with the strict letter of the Mahommedan law, he ordered this girl to be sewed up in a sack, and thrown into the sea,—­as is, indeed, quite customary at Constantinople.  As you were returning from bathing in the Piraeus,