'
"Fletcher! Murray! Bob! where are you?
Stretch'd along the deck like logs--
Bear a hand, you jolly tar, you!
Here's a rope's end for the dogs.
H---- muttering fearful curses,
As the hatchway down he rolls;
Now his breakfast, now his verses,
Vomits forth--and damns our souls.
'Here's a stanza
On Braganza--
Help!'--'A couplet?'--'No, a cup
Of warm water.'--
'What's the matter?'
'Zounds! my liver's coming up;
I shall not survive the racket
Of this brutal Lisbon Packet.'
"Now at length we're off for Turkey,
Lord knows when we shall come back!
Breezes foul and tempests murky
May unship us in a crack.
But, since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on--as I do now.
Laugh at all things,
Great and small things,
Sick or well, at sea or shore;
While we're quaffing,
Let's have laughing--
Who the devil cares for more?--
Some good wine! and who would lack it,
Ev'n on board the Lisbon Packet?
"BYRON."
On the second of July the packet sailed from Falmouth, and, after a
favourable passage of four days and a half, the voyagers reached
Lisbon, and took up their abode in that city.[118]
The following letters, from Lord Byron to his friend Mr. Hodgson,
though written in his most light and schoolboy strain, will give some
idea of the first impressions that his residence in Lisbon made upon
him.
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