s first year of absence.

The first canto describes Lisbon, Cintra, the ride through Portugal and
Spain to Seville and thence to Cadiz. He is moved by the grandeur of the
scenery, but laments the helplessness of the people and their impending
fate. Talavera was fought and won whilst he was in Spain, but he is
convinced that the "Scourge of the World" will prevail, and that Britain,
"the fond ally," will display her blundering heroism in vain. Being against
the government, he is against the war. History has falsified his politics,
but his descriptions of places and scenes, of "Morena's dusky height," of
Cadiz and the bull-fight, retain their freshness and their warmth.

Byron sailed from Gibraltar on the 16th of August, and spent a month at
Malta making love to Mrs Spencer Smith (the "Fair Florence" of c. II. s.
xxix.-xxxiii.). He anchored off Prevesa on the 28th of September. The
second canto records a journey on horseback through Albania, then almost a
_terra incognita_, as far as Tepeleni, where he was entertained by Ali
Pacha (October 20th), a yachting tour along the shores of the Ambracian
Gulf (November 8-23), a journey by land from Larnaki to Athens (December
15-25), and excursions in Attica, Sunium and Marathon (January 13-25,
1810).

Of the tour in Asia Minor, a visit to Ephesus (March 15, 1810), an
excursion in the Troad (April 13), and the famous swim across the
Hellespont (May 3), the record is to be sought elsewhere. The stanzas on
Constantinople (lxxvii.-lxxxii.), where Byron and Hobhouse stayed for two
months, though written at the time and on the spot, were not included in
the poem till 1814. They are, probably, part of a projected third canto. On
the 14th of July Hobhouse set sail for England and Byron returned to
Athens.

Of Byron's second year of residence in the East little is known beyond the
bare facts that he was travelling in the Morea during August and September,
that early in October he was at Patras, having just recovered from a severe
attack of malarial fever, and that by the 14th of November he had returned
to Athens and taken up his quarters at the Franciscan convent. Of his
movements during the next five months there is no record, but of his
studies and pursuits there is substantial evidence. He learnt Romaic, he
compiled the notes to the second canto of _Childe Harold_. He wrote (March
12) _Hints from Horace_ (published 1831), an imitation or loose translation
of the _Epistola ad Pisone