“The sensations produced by the state of the weather, and leaving a comfortable cabin, were,” says Mr Hobhouse, “in unison with the impressions which we felt, when, passing under the palace of the sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypresses, which rise above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body.”  The description in The Siege of Corinth of the dogs devouring the dead, owes its origin to this incident of the dogs and the body under the walls of the seraglio.

And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o’er the dead their carnival.
Gorging and growling o’er carcase and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar’s scull they had stripp’d the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh,
And their white tusks crunched on the whiter scull,
As it slipp’d through their jaws when their edge grew dull.
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed.
So well had they broken a lingering fast,
With those who had fallen for that night’s repast.
And Alp knew by the turbans that rolled on the sand,
The foremost of these were the best of his band.
Crimson and green were the shawls of their wear,
And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair,
All the rest was shaven and bare.
The scalps were in the wild dogs’ maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.
But close by the shore on the edge of the gulf,
There sat a vulture flapping a wolf,
Who had stolen from the hills but kept away,
Scared by the dogs from the human prey;
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
Pick’d by the birds on the sands of the bay.

This hideous picture is a striking instance of the uses to which imaginative power may turn the slightest hint, and of horror augmented till it reach that extreme point at which the ridiculous commences.  The whole compass of English poetry affords no parallel to this passage.  It even exceeds the celebrated catalogue of dreadful things on the sacramental table in Tam O’ Shanter.  It is true, that the revolting circumstances described by Byron are less sublime in their associations than those of Burns, being mere visible images, unconnected with ideas of guilt, and unlike

The knife a father’s throat had mangled,
Which his ain son of life bereft:
The gray hairs yet stuck to the heft.