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« We will do our best-and I pray you to stir your English hearts at home to more general exertion; for my part, I will stick by the cause while a plank remains which can be honourably clung to. If I quit it, it will be by the Greeks' conduct, and not the Holy Allies or the holier Mussulmans-but let us hope better things. « Ever yours,

« N. B.

« P.S.-I am happy to say that Colonel Leicester Stanhope and myself are acting in perfect harmony together he is likely to be of great service both to the cause and to the Committee, and is publicly as well as personally a very valuable acquisition to our party on every account. He came up (as they all do who have not been in the country before) with some high-flown notions of the 6th form at Harrow or Eton, etc.; but Col. Napier and I set him to rights on those points, which is absolutely necessary to prevent disgust, or perhaps return; but now we can set our shoulders soberly to the wheel, without quarrelling with the mud which may clog it occasionally.

<«<I can assure you that Col. Napier and myself are as decided for the cause as any German student of them all; but like men who have seen the country and human life, there and elsewhere, we must be permitted to view it in its truth, with its defects as well as beauties,—more especially as success will remove the former gradually. «N. B.

« P.S.—As much of this letter as you please is for the Committee, the rest may be 'entre nous.'»>

LETTER DXXXIII.

TO MR MOORE.

"

Cephalonia, December 27th, 1823.

« I received a letter from you some time ago. I have been too much employed latterly to write as I could wish, and even now must write in haste.

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I embark for Missolonghi to join Mavrocordato in four-and-twenty hours. The state of parties (but it were a long story) has kept me here till now; but now that Mavrocordato (their Washington, or their Kosciusko) is employed again, I can act with a safe conscience. I carry money to pay the squadron, etc., and I have influence with the Suliotes, supposed sufficient to keep them in harmony with some of the dissentients;-for there are plenty of differences, but trifling.

<< It is imagined that we shall attempt either Patras, or the castles on the Straits; and it seems, by most accounts, that the Greeks,—at any rate, the Suliotes, who are in affinity with me of 'bread and salt,'—expect that I should march with them, and-be it even so! If any thing in the way of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age of a brother warbler, -like Garcilasso de la Vega, Kleist, Korner, Kutoffski (a Russian nightingale-see Bowring's Anthology), or Thersander, or,-or, somebody else-but never mindI pray you to remember me in your smiles and wine.' << I have hopes that the cause will triumph; but whether it does or no, still 'Honour must be minded as strictly as a milk diet.'

"

6

I trust to observe both.

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It is hardly necessary to direct the attention of the reader to the sad, and but too true anticipation expressed in this letter—the last but one I was ever to receive from my friend. Before we accompany him to the closing scene of all his toils, I shall here, as briefly as possible, give a selection from the many characteristic anecdotes told of him, while at Cephalonia, where (to use the words of Colonel Stanhope, in a letter from thence to the Greek Committee) he was «beloved by Cephalonians, by English, and by Greeks; and where, approached as he was familiarly by persons of all classes and countries, not an action, not a word is recorded of him that does not bear honourable testimony to the benevolence and soundness of his views, his ever ready but discriminating generosity, and the clear insight, at once minute and comprehensive, which he had acquired into the character and wants of the people and the cause he came to serve. « Of all those who came to help the Greeks,» says Colonel Napier (a person himself the most qualified to judge, as well from long local knowledge, as from the acute, straightforward cast of his own mind), «I never knew one, except Lord Byron and Mr Gordon, that seemed to have justly estimated their character. All came expecting to find the Peloponnesus filled with Plutarch's men, and all returned thinking the inhabitants of Newgate more moral. Lord Byron judged them fairly; he knew that half-civilised men are full of vices, and that great allowance must be made for emancipated slaves. He, therefore, proceeded, bridle in hand, not thinking them good, but hoping to make them better.'"

1 A similar tribute was paid to him by Count Delladecima, a gentleman of some literary acquirements, of whom he saw a good deal at Cephalonia, and to whom he was attracted by that sympathy which never failed to incline him towards those who laboured, like himself, under any personal

In speaking of the foolish charge of avarice brought against Lord Byron by some who resented thus his not suffering them to impose on his generosity, Colonel Napier says « I never knew a single instance of it while he was here. I saw only a judicious generosity in all that he did. He would not allow himself to be robbed, but he gave profusely where he thought he was doing good. It was, indeed, because he would not allow himself to be fleeced, that he was called stingy by those who are always bent upon giving money from any purses but their own. Lord Byron had no idea of this; and would turn sharply and unexpectedly on those who thought their game sure.. He gave a vast deal of money to the Greeks in various ways."

Among the objects of his bounty in this way were many poor refugee Greeks from the Continent and the Isles. He not only relieved their present distresses, but allotted a certain sum monthly to the most destitute. « A list of these poor pensioners," says Dr Kennedy, << was given me by the nephew of Professor Bambas.»

One of the instances mentioned of his humanity while at Cephalonia will show how prompt he was at the call of that feeling, and how unworthy, sometimes, were the objects of it. A party of workmen employed upon one of those fine roads projected by Colonel Napier having imprudently excavated a high bank, the earth fell in and overwhelmed nearly a dozen persons; the news of which accident instantly reaching Metaxata, Lord Byron despatched his physician Bruno to the spot,

defects. " «Of all the men," said this gentleman, « whom I have had an opportunity of conversing with, on the means of establishing the independence of Greece, and regenerating the character of the natives, Lord Byron appears to entertain the most enlightened and correct views.">

tion and dissatisfaction presented themselves. Of the fourteen brigs of war which had come to the succour of Missolonghi, and which had for some time actually protected it against a Turkish fleet double its number, nine had already, hopeless of pay, returned to Hydra, while the sailors of the remaining five, from the same cause of complaint, had just quitted their ships, and were murmuring idly on shore. The inhabitants seeing themselves thus deserted, or preyed upon by their defenders, with a scarcity of provisions threatening them and the Turkish fleet before their eyes, were no less ready to break forth into riot and revolt; while, at the same moment, to complete the confusion, a General Assembly was on the point of being held in the town, for the purpose of organising the forces of Western Greece, and to this meeting all the wild mountain-chiefs of the province, ripe, of course, for dissension, were now flocking with their followers. Mavrocordato himself, the President of the intended Congress, had brought in his train no less than 5000 armed men, who were at this moment in the town. Ill provided, too, with either pay or food by the Government, this large military mob were but little less discontented and destitute than the sailors; and in short, in every direction, the entire population seems to have presented such a fermenting mass of insubordination and discord as was far more likely to produce warfare among themselves than with the enemy.

Such was the state of affairs when Lord Byron arrived at Missolonghi;-such the evils he had now to encounter, with the formidable consciousness that to him, and him alone, all looked for the removal of them.

Of his proceedings during the first weeks after his arrival, the following letters to Mr Hancock (which by

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