for suspecting, give a double sigh to the degradation which the money actually transmitted from England has stamped upon the character and the fortunes of Greece, when they reflect how much more admirably that pittance also might have been managed at home.

Of the way in which the committee did their business, we shall cite an example. Among the grand notions of the imaginative Colonel was the immediate creation of a national marine. To those who knew the country, and the peculiar interests of its maritime population, this project appeared as feasible as a project of a national balloonery. But the Colonel,

'Great on the deck as in the saddle,'

prevailed; and two intelligent and ingenuous young persons, who appear to have possessed in a high degree that easy confidence which is so amiable in youth, were sent out with 50,000 sovereigns. Their directions, it appears, were to obtain from the executive government some securities for the payment of the future interest, and some pledge for the fit appropriation of the loan. The executive had no notion of doing any such thing, and the youths sailed away. On this the executive saw that something must be done, and sent after the young men with all sorts of promises, which the natural confiding ardour of their tender years induced them to believe. But on getting into Nauplia the crew fell sick:the money was landed; the government took possession-without giving any pledge;-and the youths were sent back disconsolate to their parental committee, goldless and pledgeless, with a strenuous piece of advice to consult the old king of Prussia's favourite text Tarry at Jericho until your beards be grown.'

It would be an useless waste of time to enumerate all the similar blunders of this egregious body, and their regular agents. One agent, however, they had, concerning whom it is impossible to be altogether silent. Of that great man it has often been our lot to speak, in accents of censure, during his life; but never did we for a moment suffer ourselves to entertain a doubt prejudicial to the loftiness and brilliancy of those talents, the misapplication of which we had sometimes to deplore. Sincerely did we grieve, that when (to borrow the words of the greatest of his literary contemporaries) only thirty-six years old-so much already done for immortalityso much time remaining, as it seemed to us short-sighted mortals, to maintain and to extend his fame, and to atone for errors in conduct or levities in composition such a race should have been shortened, though not always keeping the straight path; such a light extinguished, though sometimes flaming to dazzle and bewilder.' Nor was the bitterness of our regret diminished when we considered that his life had been sacrificed in vain. That he, with his vivid classical recollections-with the dreams of his own youth

ful

ful scenes in Greece, which he had embalmed and immortalised in verses that have made them part of the thoughts and feelings of every educated mind in the civilised world-that he should have felt an ardent sympathy with the representatives of the ancient Greeks, the natives of the shores visited by Childe Harold, suffering under Tartar oppression, was in no manner wonderful. It would have been wonderful if he had not. But what did he effect by his expedition? Nothing. He landed and remained in that part of the country where his exertions were calculated to do the least possible good. Mistaking the picturesque for the useful, he surrounded himself with Suliote mountaineers, whose manners serve much better to adorn the verses of a romaunt than to render them valuable auxiliaries in a beleaguered fortress. While at Missolonghi, he amused his mind with planning various conquests over places of old renown, yet in five months felt it impossible to stir one inch from the spot on which he had first landed. Harassed at last by the discords between his favourite mountaineers and the other Greek patriots-fretted by the ingratitude of those whom he patronisedworn out by attempts to reconcile factions, discordant on no principle intelligible out of their own demi-civilised circles— talked at by Colonel Stanhope-written at by the Greek com mittee-disappointed on finding what his Greek associates were not, and what his English fellow-committee-men and brother agents were, (he did not suspect, we imagine, the gentlemen's talents on Cornhill,)-it is no wonder that he was mortified to the soul, when he saw that the eyes of civilised Europe were turned upon him, and that he had it not in his power to do any thing worthy of his name. He sickened and he died-he had done nothing for Greece-he could have done nothing but what did the committee care for that? His name had raised the value of the Greek cause where merchants most do congregate; and he fell a victim, in order that some chosen philanthropist of St. Nicholas'lane might make a particular per centage on a very particular scrip. If we could jest on such a subject, we might parody Dryden's distich, and say, that

To die for faction is a common evil,

But to expire for consols is the devil.'

But we feel that such language would not be more indecorous, in reference to the illustrious dead, than inconsistent with our own sense of his loss. For some years before his death he had connected himself with persons far below him in rank, immeasurably below hìm in intellect he had forsaken his native land, and much that should have endeared it to him besides he had permitted his name to become the butt of the commonest dabblers in the meanest sinks of literature-and he had suffered accordingly in public estimation.

Yet

Yet even then some productions fell from his pen worthy of his best days; and in Don Juan itself there was mixed up with what was in every point of view, whether of taste or morals, most reprehensible, much also of what was most excellent in composition, varied in character, poetical in imagination. He had, we cannot help believing, found out the mistake under which he had laboured, and was anxious to resume that station to which his talents and condition entitled him, when this unhappy Greek committee threw their lures in his way. He went to Greece, and lost his life for worse than nothing among the dreary marshes of Missolonghi, at the moment when there was most chance of his being recovered as an unblemished ornament to England. His conduct in Greece showed that his real feelings were as much aloof as day from darkness, from those of the crack-brained reformers with whom it was his misfortune to mix. Like many other clever men, as long as he knew nothing of real business-whilst he only dreamt on in a world of his own creating, he was a Liberal when he once saw how the actual affairs of life were to be managed, and came into practical contact with the statesmen of that party, he laughed their silly nostrums to scorn. He found that it was much easier to sneer at governments than to govern-to criticise military operations, than to carry them on. A man of his genius and observation must have ere long seen reason to suspect that Wellington or Napoleon, nay, Blucher or Massena, would not have loitered half a year in talking of preparations without doing anything-and he might have consoled himself with the reflection, that not one of these four great captains, or any other great captain that the world ever produced, could have described the battles which they fought, in Spenserian verses at all comparable to his. Lord Byron had never, in fact, had any opportunity of seeing business before; and we feel confident that, had he survived, he would have returned home, to abjure the foul society which he had unconsciously permitted to colour his mind-to apologise for political aberrations committed under delusion-and to renounce all fellowship with a party which he had found at once faithless and incapable. His conduct to Colonel Stanhope goes far to support us in this belief. The flimsy nonsense of this well-meaning gentleman about the press, and education, and representation, and legislation, was opposed by the utmost power of his intellect and his influence; and his unanswerable objections were met only by such arguments to his face, as the Colonel's You are a Turk,' and behind his back by the sneers of those who, sharing the Colonel's politics, but not his breeding, were continually muttering He is a Lord. He who accused Lord Byron of being a Turk had never made the tenth part of his exertions or sacrifices in the cause of

Greece;

Greece; and as for the others, from the contamination of such associates, and the worse contamination of their principles, Lord Byron would have escaped, had it pleased Providence that he should have survived. But it was otherwise determined was destined to

'A petty fortress on a barren strand;'

his fall

and he left that name, at which every honourable bosom in the world would have throbbed, to be associated with dirty details of unpaid mechanics, griping deputies, and transactions of ultrausury, or suspected swindling, on the part of some of the most clamorously pure of English patriots.

We have kept, in these our remarks, quite free from any observations on the second Greek loan, because we perceive that the Philhellenes of the Greek committee disclaim it. This must be considered as a piece of great forbearance on our part. Whatever may be thought of the roguery, or mistakes, attendant on getting up this second loan, it is evident that it originated, if not from the identically same set as that which got up the first, yet among persons actuated by the same fine feelings, and philanthropic and patriotic ideas of exactly the same character. This loan was for 2,000,000l., of which it would seem that 182,400l. in specie, 68,2001. in stores, 315,000l. in ship-building, and 52,100l. in other ways-in all 617,700l.-viz. nearly, as in the former loan, something LESS THAN A THIRD, has reached Greece. Of the two loans, therefore, amounting to 2,800,000l., the sum of 928,000l. has gone to the poor Greeks, who have promised to pay, of course, something like twenty per cent. on this money, and who, equally of course, cannot pay five shillings per cent. upon it; and the difference, amounting nominally to 1,872,000l. -one million eight hundred and seventy-two thousand pounds!-(how much really we have no opportunity of calculating,) has gladdened the hearts of deputies, committee-men, builders of frigates at prices for which all the annals of official jobbing present no parallel,** quarter-deck cavalry-officers, (the old Joe Miller joke on the horse-marines having been verified at last,) literary news-writers, and poetical state-paper-mongers in unread pamphlets! The account would look well in figures:

But before we drop the subject, we must ask a political question

* We are again quoting the last dying speech in the Westminster Review.

about

about these loans. We do not make an inquiry in reference to the absurdity (which, however, stares us in the face) of people requiring the money of a foreign country.to rid them of domestic oppression, when we were told that the whole population had risen against it; and that the oppressors, dastardly and uncivilised, were flying in all directions before the arms of the representatives of Miltiades and Agesilaus; nor shall we stop to do more than merely record our opinion, that a loan to the Greeks must, under any management, have been a dangerous boon. Our question is connected with international law. Our government has not interfered with loans to foreign powers; and justly-because it would be difficult, and might perhaps be rendered impossible, to draw a distinction between such loans and common commercial transactions: but in these Greek loans there is this specific difference from all others -that the lenders contract with the borrowers, that the money shall be expended in a particular manner, and that manner the payment of military service against the Porte—a government with whom we are in relations of the most profound peace. The Philhellenes, in their bulletins and despatches from Greece, which are now admitted to have been tissues of falsehood, clamoured loudly and most untruly against our Ionian government for breaking the neutrality we had promised: it strikes us that such a complaint might have come with much more justice from the Turks, who saw money raised in England avowedly for the purpose of invading their territory, burning their towns, and blowing up their people. The Divan might, we think, have remonstrated, when they learnt from his newspaperto do him justice, he gave them no opportunity of personal knowledge of his operations against them that Lieut.-Colonel Stanhope, an officer of high rank in his Majesty's service, was directing the Greek insurrection unchecked. It is indeed possible, as the worthy bard of the Greek Bubble' suggests, that the Turks thought their cause could not be better served, than by allowing the pecuniary affairs of their refractory subjects to be managed by the Greek committee, and the military department regulated by its agents. Yet, we trust, that if the matter comes in any way before Parliament, as in all probability it will, some plain-spoken countrygentleman may be found to take the more obvious view of the transaction.

We are weary of exposing folly and imposture, and shall conclude by a few remarks on the composition of the famous body which has betrayed the Greeks. The gentlemen who composed it are not obscure. They are principally of that class of politicians who think everything in all governments in the world wrongly managed. Some of them, theorising deeply, unsettle the foundations of all society, and show themselves on paper the only persons qualified to fabricate

a consistent