* * * *

In the month of May appeared his wild and beautiful "Fragment," _The
Giaour_;--and though, in its first flight from his hands, some of the
fairest feathers of its wing were yet wanting, the public hailed this
new offspring of his genius with wonder and delight. The idea of writing
a poem in fragments had been suggested to him by the _Columbus_ of Mr.
Rogers; and, whatever objections may lie against such a plan in general,
it must be allowed to have been well suited to the impatient temperament
of Byron, as enabling him to overleap those mechanical difficulties,
which, in a regular narrative, embarrass, if not chill, the
poet,--leaving it to the imagination of his readers to fill up the
intervals between those abrupt bursts of passion in which his chief
power lay. The story, too, of the poem possessed that stimulating charm
for him, almost indispensable to his fancy, of being in some degree
connected with himself,--an event in which he had been personally
concerned, while on his travels, having supplied the groundwork on which
the fiction was founded. After the appearance of The Giaour, some
incorrect statement of this romantic incident having got into
circulation, the noble author requested of his friend, the Marquis of
Sligo, who had visited Athens soon after it happened, to furnish him
with his recollections on the subject; and the following is the answer
which Lord Sligo returned:--

"Albany, Monday, August 31. 1813.

"My dear Byron,

"You have requested me to tell you all that I heard at Athens about
the affair of that girl who was so near being put an end to while
you were there; you have asked me to mention every circumstance, in
the remotest degree relating to it, which I heard. In compliance
with your wishes, I write to you all I heard, and I cannot imagine
it to be very far from the fact, as the circumstance happened only
a day or two before I arrived at Athens, and, consequently, was a
matter of common conversation at the time.

"The new governor, unaccustomed to have the same intercourse with
the Christians as his predecessor, had of course the barbarous
Turkish ideas with regard to women. In consequence, and in
compliance with the strict letter of the Mahommedan law, he ordered
this girl to be sewed up in a sack, and thrown into the sea,--as
is, indeed, quite customary at Constantinople. As you