enserian measure.
It was called The Unknown, and was intended to describe, in narrating
the voyages and adventures of a pilgrim, who had embarked for the
Holy Land, the scenes I expected to visit. I was occasionally
engaged in this composition during the passage with Lord Byron from
Gibraltar to Malta, and he knew what I was about. In stating this, I
beg to be distinctly understood, as in no way whatever intending to
insinuate that this work had any influence on the composition of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Lord Byron began to write in
Albania; but it must be considered as something extraordinary, that
the two works should have been so similar in plan, and in the
structure of the verse. His Lordship never saw my attempt that I
know of, nor did I his poem until it was printed. It is needless to
add, that beyond the plan and verse there was no other similarity
between the two works; I wish there had been.

His Lordship has published a poem, called The Curse of Minerva, the
subject of which is the vengeance of the goddess on Lord Elgin for
the rape of the Parthenon. It has so happened that I wrote at Athens
a burlesque poem on nearly the same subject (mine relates to the
vengeance of all the gods) which I called The Atheniad; the
manuscript was sent to his Lordship in Asia Minor, and returned to me
through Mr Hobhouse. His Curse of Minerva, I saw for the first time
in 1828, in Galignani's edition of his works.

In The Giaour, which he published a short time before The Bride of
Abydos, he has this passage, descriptive of the anxiety with which
the mother of Hassan looks out for the arrival of her son:

The browsing camels' bells are tinkling--
His mother look'd from her lattice high;
She saw the dews of eve besprinkling
The parterre green beneath her eye:
She saw the planets faintly twinkling--
'Tis twilight--sure his train is nigh.
She could not rest in the garden bower,
But gazed through the grate of his steepest tower:
Why comes he not--and his steeds are fleet--
Nor shrink they from the summer heat?
Why sends not the bridegroom his promised gift;
Is his heart more cold or his barb less swift?

His Lordship was well read in the Bible, and the book of Judges,
chap. 5, and verse 28, has the following passage:--

"The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the
lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming; why tarry the wheels
of his chariot?"

It was, indeed, an ear