in of
boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was
bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month,
when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his
stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate
dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time
rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political
assassinations. Nothing else remains of his sojourn to interest us, save
the statement of Mr. Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous,
though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the
Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, Byron praises the
neighbouring Cintra, as "the most beautiful village in the world," though
he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and
extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of
which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English
had any books in their country. Despatching his baggage and servants by
sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend started on horseback through the
south-west of Spain. Their first resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles,
performed at an average rate of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was
Seville, where they lodged for three days in the house of two ladies, to
whose attractions, as well as the fascination he seems to have exerted
over them, the poet somewhat garrulously refers. Here, too, he saw,
parading on the Prado, the famous _Maid of Saragossa_, whom he celebrates
in his equally famous stanzas (_Childe Harold_, I., 54-58). Of Cadiz, the
next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, describing the
bull fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing prose. The belles of
this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches of Spain; and by reason of
them, rather than the sea-shore or the Sierra Morena, "sweet Cadiz is the
first spot in the creation." Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to
Gibraltar, for which place he has nothing but curses. Byron had no
sympathy with the ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great
struggle with the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to
have sympathized with Napoleon.

The ship stopped at Cagliari in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti on the
Sicilian coast. Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three weeks--time
enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, fli