Towards the end of his two-year Grand Tour, Byron explained in a letter to his mother why he had dispatched his manservant Fletcher, a Brexiter avant la letter, back to England.
Besides the perpetual lamentations after beef & beer, the stupid, bigoted contempt for every thing foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him like all other English servants an incumbrance. – I do assure you the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far), the pilaws (a Turkish dish of meat and rice) which he would not eat, the wines which he could not drink, the beds where he could not sleep, & the long list of calamities such as stumbling horses, want of tea!!! &c. which assailed him would have made a lasting source of laughter to a spectator, and of inconvenience to a Master.
Athens, 14 January 1811
