With the genuine literary thrift that marked all of Byron's career, he
preserved a copy of the lines, and some years after recast them, touched
them up a bit, included the stuff in a book--and there you are.

The other incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare
and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two
dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it
at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years
after he wrote thus:

"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws when the edge grew dull."

And this only proves that Hobhouse was not a poet and Byron was. The poet
is never content to state the mere facts--facts are only valuable as
suggestions for poetry.

Travel often excites the spirit to the point of expression. Good travelers
carry pads and pencils. Byron reached England with fragments of marbles,
skulls, pictures, shells, spears, guns, curios beyond count, and many
manuscripts in process.

Upon arriving on the English coast the first news that reached him was