vid who had voted for the death of Louis XVI.
On the contrary, the memory of the great English sculptor was held in
deep reverence.

And so David departed, a wanderer on the face of the earth with his
daughter. He first endeavoured to settle in Brussels, but the
irresistible desire to behold once more what he himself considered his
greatest work, the monument to Marcos Botzaris, attracted him to Greece.
A friend, to whom he communicated his intention, wrote to him, "Do not
go." He gave him no further reason; he even withheld from him the fact
that he had been at Missolonghi a twelvemonth previously. The
explanation of this reticence may be gathered from David's letter to him
a few days after his, David's, return. I have been allowed to copy it,
and give it verbatim.

"Long before our vessel anchored near the spot where Byron died, I
caught a glimpse of the tumulus erected at the foot of the bastion, in
honour of Botzaris and his fellow-heroes. It made a small dark spot on
the horizon, and above it was a speck, much smaller and perfectly white.
I knew instinctively that this was my statue of the 'young Greek girl,'
and I watched and watched with bated breath, fancying as the ship sped
along that the speck moved. Of course, it was only my imagination, the
presumptuous thought that the marble effigy would start into life at the
approach of its creator.

"Alas, would I had proceeded no further--that I had been satisfied with
the mirage instead of pushing on in hot haste towards the reality! For
the reality was heart-rending, so heart-rending that I wept like a
child, and clenched my fists like a giant in despair. The right hand of
the statue, the index finger of which pointed to the name, had been
broken; the ears had disappeared, one of the feet was broken to atoms,
and the face slashed with knives. It was like the face of the girl that
had sat for me, when I last saw it, under the circumstances which, you
may remember, I told you. The whole was riddled with bullets, and some
tourists, British ones probably, had cut their names on the back of the
child. And so ends the most glorious chapter of my artist's career--the
model itself fallen beyond redemption, the work mutilated beyond repair,
the author of it in exile.

"I felt powerless to repair the mischief. I did not stay long. Perhaps I
ought not to complain. I knew that Byron had been buried near the
fortifications at Missolonghi, but all my efforts to find the spot