“I have said that I saw these Grecian beauties through the waving aromatic plants before their window.  This, perhaps, has raised your imagination somewhat too high, in regard to their condition.  You may have supposed their dwelling to have every attribute of eastern luxury.  The golden cups, too, may have thrown a little witchery over your excited fancy.  Confess, do you not imagine that the doors

      “’Self-open’d into halls, where, who can tell
      What elegance and grandeur wide expand,
      The pride of Turkey and of Persia’s land;
      Soft quilts on quilts, on carpets carpets spread,
      And couches stretch’d around in seemly band,
      And endless pillows rise to prop the head,
    So that each spacious room was one full swelling bed?’

“You will shortly perceive the propriety of my delaying, till now, to inform you that the aromatic plants which I have mentioned are neither more nor less than a few geraniums and Grecian balms, and that the room in which the ladies sit is quite unfurnished, the walls neither painted nor decorated by ‘cunning hand.’  Then, what would have become of the Graces had I told you sooner that a single room is all they have, save a little closet and a kitchen?  You see how careful I have been to make the first impression good; not that they do not merit every praise, but that it is in man’s august and elevated nature to think a little slightingly of merit, and even of beauty, if not supported by some worldly show.  Now, I shall communicate to you a secret, but in the lowest whisper.

“These ladies, since the death of the consul, their father, depend on strangers living in their spare room and closet,—­which we now occupy.  But, though so poor, their virtue shines as conspicuously as their beauty.

“Not all the wealth of the East, or the complimentary lays even of the first of England’s poets, could render them so truly worthy of love and admiration."[134]

Ten weeks had flown rapidly away, when the unexpected offer of a passage in an English sloop of war to Smyrna induced the travellers to make immediate preparations for departure, and, on the 5th of March, they reluctantly took leave of Athens.  “Passing,” says Mr. Hobhouse, “through the gate leading to the Piraeus, we struck into the olive-wood on the road going to Salamis, galloping at a quick pace, in order to rid ourselves, by hurry, of the pain of parting.”  He adds, “We could not refrain from looking back, as we passed rapidly to the shore, and we continued to direct our eyes towards the spot, where we had caught the last glimpse of the Theseum and the ruins of the Parthenon through the vistas in the woods, for many minutes after the city and the Acropolis had been totally hidden from our view.”

At Smyrna Lord Byron took up his residence in the house of the consul-general, and remained there, with the exception of two or three days employed in a visit to the ruins of Ephesus, till the 11th of April.  It was during this time, as appears from a memorandum of his own, that the two first Cantos of Childe Harold, which he had begun five months before at Ioannina, were completed.  The memorandum alluded to, which I find prefixed to his original manuscript of the poem, is as follows:—­