the lovely scenery that
met his eye on ascending the Piraeus;[198] and to the Cape Colonna, and
to the so-called Tomb of Themistocles in the "Giaour;" and Galt fancies
he can remember by what circumstance and aspect of nature they were
inspired.

Lord Byron did not admit the possibility of describing a site that had
not been seen, a sentiment that had not been experienced, or at least
well known on certain and direct testimony. Never could people say of
him, what M. Sainte-Beuve asserted of Chateaubriand, namely, _that he
had not visited the places he described, that he lent to some what of
right belonged only to others, and that he had not even seen Niagara_.

On the contrary, when Lord Byron was writing, the objects described were
really present, so to say, as facts rather than in imagination.

Mr. Galt was so persuaded of this that he almost denied him the
possession of imagination, and he says that the stamp of personal
experience is so strongly marked in many of Lord Byron's productions,
usually considered fancies or inventions, that he deems it impossible
not to assign for their basis real facts or events wherein he had been
either actor or spectator.

To refuse Lord Byron imagination would be absurd; but it is true that
his imagination could only have discovered the elements and materials so
wonderfully put together, through a scrupulous and profound observation
of reality. And it was only afterward, that superadding sentiment and
thought, he wrought out such splendid truths, which, if not precisely
combined in the living reality, were so far superior that any absence in
the original model appeared like a forgetfulness of nature.

Without, then, admitting Mr. Galt's ideas, in their extreme
consequences, it is at least certain that Lord Byron's genius required
so much to lean on truth in all things, that it may be said he owed far
more to facts than to the power of imagination.

Apart from the faculty of combining, which he possessed in a splendid
manner, if any one should take the trouble to observe, one by one, the
characters he has painted, we should be still more confirmed in the
above opinion. For instance, Conrad, that magnificent type of the
corsair, that energetic compound of an Albanese warrior and a naval
officer, far from being an imaginary character, was entirely drawn from
nature and real history. All who have travelled in the Levant, and
especially at that period, must have met with personages