Travels in Greece and Albania (1)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1830 Excerpt: ...a memento of their wrongs, and a stimulus to the recovery of their SURRENDER OF PARGA. 245 country: others took for the same purpose a small portion of those sacred ashes, which had been once animated by the spirits of their forefathers, and many carried away the bones which they had not time to burn. When the bands of Ali Pasha reached the walls, all was solitude and silence. The city, as it has been observed, received its infidel garrison as Babylon or Palmyra salutes the Christian traveller in the desert--nothing breathed, nothing moved; the houses were desolate, the nation was extinct, the bones of the dead were almost consumed to ashes, whilst the only sign that living creatures had been there was the smoke slowly ascending from the funeral piles. In the above details, written at the time of thia sad transaction, I was, as now, uninfluenced by any party feelings, and unexcited by any motives to detraction. I was and still am totally unacquainted with the individuals connected, or supposed to be connected, with the cession of Parga, and no one, I think, who has read these pages, will accuse me of a desire to calumniate my country; a country whose constitution I venerate, and whose very soil I love; but he who loves his own country best will be most tender of the rights of others, and I own I was anxious that every shadow of reproach should vanish from the name of that country amongst foreign nations, and that its ancient character for honour and generosity should have been preserved inviolate: having moreover been a resident upon the rock of Parga and also resident in Albania, when the tyrant, whose history I have undertaken to portray, made his first attempts against that republic, I felt called upon to detail fearlessly and impartially every circumsta...