of his satire-the exposure and denunciation of Lord Elgin -had been accomplished by the scathing stanzas (canto ii. 10-15), with their accompanying note, in Childe Harold. "Disown" it as he might, his words were past recall, and both indictments stand in his name.

Byron was prejudiced against Elgin before he started on his tour. He had, perhaps, glanced at the splendid folio, Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, which was issued by the Dilettanti Society in 1809. Payne Knight wrote the preface, in which he maintains that the friezes and metopes of the Parthenon were not the actual work of Phidias, “but . . . architectural studies. . . probably by workmen scarcely ranked among artists." So judged the leader of the cognoscenti, and, in accordance with his views, Elgin and Aberdeen are held up to ridicule in English Bards (second edition, October, 1809, 1. 1007, and note) as credulous and extravagant collectors of "maimed antiques." It was, however, not till the first visit to Athens (December, 1809-March, 1810), when he saw with his own eyes the "ravages of barbarous and antiquarian despoilers" (Lord Broughton's Travels in Albania, 1858, i. 259), that contempt gave way to indignation, and his wrath found vent in the pages of Childe Harold.

Byron cared as little for ancient buildings as he did for the authorities, or for patriotic enterprise, but he was stirred to the quick by the marks of fresh and, as he was led to believe, wanton injury to "Athena's poor remains." The southern side of the half-wrecked Parthenon had been deprived of its remaining metopes, which had suffered far less from the weather than the other sides which are still in the building; all that remained of the frieze had been stripped from the three sides of the cella, and the eastern pediment had been despoiled of its diminished and mutilated, but still splendid, group of figures; and, though five or six years had gone by, the blank spaces between the triglyphs must have revealed their recent exposure to the light, and the shattered edges of the cornice, which here and there had been raised and demolished to permit the dislodgment of the metopes, must have caught the eye as they sparkled in the sun. Nor had the removal and

deportation of friezes and statues come to an end. The firman which Dr. Hunt, the chaplain to the embassy, had obtained in 1801, which empowered Elgin and his agents to take away qualche pezzi di pietra, still ran, and Don Tita Lusieri, the Italian artist, who remained in Elgin's service, was still, like the canes venatici (Americané, "smell-dogs") employed by Verres in Sicily (see Childe Harold, canto ii. st. 12, note), finding fresh relics, and still bewailing to sympathetic travellers the hard fate which compelled him to despoil the temples malgré lui. The feelings of the inhabitants themselves were not much in question, but their opinions were quoted for and against the removal of the marbles. Elgin's secretary and prime agent, W. R. Hamilton, testifies, from personal knowledge, that, "so far from exciting any unpleasant sensations, the people seemed to feel it as the means of bringing foreigners into the country, and of having money spent there” (Memoir on the Earl of Elgin's Pursuits in Greece, 1811). On the other hand, the traveller, Edward Daniel Clarke, with whom Byron corresponded (see Childe Harold, canto ii. st. 12, note), speaks of the attachment of the Turks to the Parthenon, and their religious veneration for the building as a mosque, and tells a pathetic story of the grief of the Disdar when " a metope was lowered, and the adjacent masonry scattered its white fragments with thundering noise among the ruins (Travels in Various Countries, part ii. sect. ii. p. 483).

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Other travellers of less authority than Clarke-Dodwell, for instance, who visited the Parthenon before it had been dismantled, and, afterwards, was present at the removal of metopes; and Hughes, who came after Byron (autumn, 1813) make use of such phrases as shattered desolation," ," "wanton devastation and avidity of plunder." Even Michaelis, the great archæologist, who denounces The Curse of Minerva as a "libellous poem," and affirms "that only blind passion could doubt that Lord Elgin's act was an act of preservation," admits that "the removal of several metopes and of the statue from the Erechtheion had severely injured the surrounding architecture" (Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, by A. Michaelis, translated by C. A. M. Fennell, 1882, p. 135). Highly coloured and

emotional as some of these phrases may be, they explain, if they do not justify, the sæva indignatio of Byron's satire.

It is almost, if not quite, unnecessary to state the facts on the other side. History regards Lord Elgin as a disinterested official, who at personal loss (at least thirty-five thousand pounds on his own showing), and in spite of opposition and disparagement, secured for his own country and the furtherance of art the perishable fragments of Phidian workmanship, which, but for his intervention, might have perished altogether. If they had eluded the clutches of Turkish mason and Greek dealer in antiquities-if, by some happy chance, they had escaped the ravages of war, the gradual but gradually increasing assaults of rain and frost would have already left their effacing scars on the "Elgin marbles." As it is, the progress of decay has been arrested, and all the world is the gainer. Byron was neither a prophet nor an archæologist, and time and knowledge have put him in the wrong. But in 1810 the gaps in the entablature of the Parthenon were new, the Phidian marbles were huddled in a damp dirty penthouse" in Park Lane (see Life of Haydon, i. 84), and the logic of events had not justified a sad necessity.

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