a dream that sprung
up afterwards, when the image of the fair Florence had become
idealised in his fancy, and every remembrance of their pleasant hours
among "Calypso's isles" came invested by his imagination with the warm
aspect of love. It will be recollected that to the chilled and sated
feelings which early indulgence, and almost as early disenchantment,
had left behind, he attributes in these verses the calm and
passionless regard, with which even attractions like those of Florence
were viewed by him. That such was actually his distaste, at this
period, to all real objects of love or passion (however his fancy
could call up creatures of its own to worship) there is every reason
to believe; and the same morbid indifference to those pleasures he had
once so ardently pursued still continued to be professed by him on his
return to England. No anchoret, indeed, could claim for himself much
more apathy towards all such allurements than he did at that period.
But to be _thus_ saved from temptation was a dear-bought safety, and,
at the age of three-and-twenty, satiety and disgust are but melancholy
substitutes for virtue.

The brig of war, in which they sailed, having been ordered to convoy a
fleet of small merchant-men to Patras and Prevesa, they remained, for
two or three days, at anchor off the former place. From thence,
proceeding to their ultimate destination, and catching a sunset view
of Missolonghi in their way, they landed, on the 29th of September, at
Prevesa.

The route which Lord Byron now took through Albania, as well as those
subsequent journeys through other parts of Turkey, which he performed
in company with his friend Mr. Hobhouse, may be traced, by such as are
desirous of details on the subject, in the account which the latter
gentleman has given of his travels; an account which, interesting from
its own excellence in every merit that should adorn such a work,
becomes still more so from the feeling that Lord Byron is, as it were,
present through its pages, and that we there follow his first
youthful footsteps into the land with whose name he has intertwined
his own for ever. As I am enabled, however, by the letters of the
noble poet to his mother, as well as by others, still more curious,
which are now, for the first time, published, to give his own rapid
and lively sketches of his wanderings, I shall content myself, after
this general reference to the volume of Mr. Hobhouse, with such
occasional extra