Lord Byron did not care for the sculptures, calling them "misshapen monuments." He strongly objected to their removal from Greece, denouncing Elgin as a vandal. His view of the removal of the Marbles from Athens is also reflected poetically in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:
- Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
- Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
- By British hands, which it had best behoved
- To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.
- Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
- And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
- And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!