Murray! Bob! where are you?
Stretch'd along the deck like logs--
Bear a hand, you jolly tar, you!
Here's a rope's end for the dogs.
H---- muttering fearful curses,
As the hatchway down he rolls;
Now his breakfast, now his verses,
Vomits forth--and damns our souls.
'Here's a stanza
On Braganza--
Help!'--'A couplet?'--'No, a cup
Of warm water.'--
'What's the matter?'
'Zounds! my liver's coming up;
I shall not survive the racket
Of this brutal Lisbon Packet.'

"Now at length we're off for Turkey,
Lord knows when we shall come back!
Breezes foul and tempests murky
May unship us in a crack.
But, since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on--as I do now.
Laugh at all things,
Great and small things,
Sick or well, at sea or shore;
While we're quaffing,
Let's have laughing--
Who the devil cares for more?--
Some good wine! and who would lack it,
Ev'n on board the Lisbon Packet?

"BYRON."

On the second of July the packet sailed from Falmouth, and, after a
favourable passage of four days and a half, the voyagers reached
Lisbon, and took up their abode in that city.[118]

The following letters, from Lord Byron to his friend Mr. Hodgson,
though written in his most light and schoolboy strain, will give some
idea of the first impressions that his residence in Lisbon made upon
him. Such letters, too, contrasted with the noble stanzas on Portugal
in "Childe Harold," will show how various were the moods of his
versatile mind, and what different aspects it could take when in
repose or on the wing.

LETTER 37.

TO MR. HODGSON.

"Lisbon, July 16. 1809.

"Thus far have we pursued our route, and seen all sorts of marvellous
sights, palaces, convents, &c.;--which, being to be heard in my
friend Hobhouse's forthcoming Book of Travels, I shall not anticipate
by smuggling any account whatsoever to you in a private and
clandestine manner. I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in
Estremadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world.

"I am very happy here, because I loves oranges, and talk bad Latin to
the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own,--and I goes
into society (with my pocket-pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all
across at once, and