of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
The Cross descends, thy minarets arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,
Through many a cypress grove within each city's ken.

Of the inhabitants of Albania--the Arnaouts or Albanese--Lord Byron
says they reminded him strongly of the Highlanders of Scotland, whom
they undoubtedly resemble in dress, figure, and manner of living.
"The very mountains seemed Caledonian with a kinder climate. The
kilt, though white, the spare active form, their dialect, Celtic in
its sound, and their hardy habits, all carried me back to Morven. No
nation are so detested and dreaded by their neighbours as the
Albanese; the Greeks hardly regard them as Christians, or the Turks
as Moslems, and in fact they are a mixture of both, and sometimes
neither. Their habits are predatory: all are armed, and the red-
shawled Arnaouts, the Montenegrins, Chimeriotes, and Gedges, are
treacherous; the others differ somewhat in garb, and essentially in
character. As far as my own experience goes, I can speak favourably.
I was attended by two, an infidel and a Mussulman, to Constantinople
and every other part of Turkey which came within my observations, and
men more faithful in peril and indefatigable in service are nowhere
to be found. The infidel was named Basilius, the Moslem Dervish
Tahiri; the former a man of middle age, and the latter about my own.
Basili was strictly charged by Ali Pasha in person to attend us, and
Dervish was one of fifty who accompanied us through the forests of
Acarnania, to the banks of the Achelous, and onward to Missolonghi.
There I took him into my own service, and never had occasion to
repent it until the moment of my departure.

"When in 1810, after my friend, Mr Hobhouse, left me for England, I
was seized with a severe fever in the Morea, these men saved my life
by frightening away my physician, whose throat they threatened to cut
if I was not cured within a given time. To this consolatory
assurance of posthumous retribution, and a resolute refusal of Dr
Romanelli's prescriptions, I attributed my recovery. I had left my
last remaining English servant at Athens; my dragoman was as ill as
myself; and my poor Arnaouts nursed me with an attention which would
have done honour to civilization.

"They had a variety of adventures, for the Moslem, Dervish, being a
remarkably handsome man, was always squabbling with the husbands