We leave our readers to judge between these two accounts of the motives of these illustrious chrétiens accourus de l'occident' and to decide whether the Muse sévère de l'Histoire' of M. de Pouqueville, or the still more severe Muse of the versifier, (who, we regret to say, is occasionally coarse and clumsy,) is the more correct. We assure them that we have no intention of dragging them through all the controversial mire with which the newspapers have been filled for some weeks past, respecting the several parts played in the Greek Bubble,' by the various members of the Greek committee. The economical Mr. Hume's over-anxiety for scrip the erudite Mr. Bowring's various translations of stock-the romantic partialities for per cents. displayed by Orlando, who seems to have been the innamorato of these goddesses of 'Change Alleywith other minor performances, have been sufficiently discussed. We believe that public opinion is quite made up on all these details, and that when the sacred cause of insurrection all over the world shall again need a loan, the suffering patriots, wherever arising, will allow such statesmen as we have been alluding to, to plead their cause-to clamour about their wrongs to weep over their miseries-to dabble as much as they please in the metaphysical, poetical, and periodical departments, provided always, that they keep their fingers from meddling with the pecuniary. When one of these Milordoi-kai-kurioi, as the Greek newspapers call them, drops hereafter a hint about a loan, we suspect that the answer will be something like what certain Athenians, of old, according to Shakspeare, gave a nobler borrower :- Commend me bountifully to his good lordship; and I hope his honour will conceive the fairest of me, because I have no power to be kind: and tell him this from me, I count it one of my greatest afflictions, say, that I cannot pleasure such an honourable gentleman*.'

We shall suffer the committee to flounder out of the scrape as they can. When all their pleadings and counter-pleadings are fully before the public, we may perhaps take up this part of the subject, and analyze it with suitable minuteness. In the mean time, we recommend it to the serious attention of a statesman with whose presence the city of London has honoured St. Stephen's. It has been officially announced that Mr. Alderman Waithman intends probing with his powerful hand the various frauds in the money-market committed during the delusion of the last two years; and we hope that he will bring his brilliant eloquence to bear with especial effect on the Greek loan, in which he will find this additional topic for declamationthat while the mining, washing, milking, teaching, salting,

*Timon of Athens.

bricking

bricking companies, &c., openly avowed their views to be wholly pecuniary, their brethren in ingenuity of the Greek Company, sheltered the same designs under the high-sounding names of liberty and benevolence.

We frankly confess, that our aversion to the Greek committee is of older standing than the miserable exposure of their doings in the money market. From the first, we considered them as a body whose proceedings required to be closely watched. We thought that the establishment of a committee of public safety, for such they almost immediately made themselves, was highly objectionable. In all their transactions with Greece they acted as the government, not of England only, but of Greece herself. Their emissaries (especially Colonel Stanhope and Mr. Blaquiere) took upon themselves the tone of high ministerial agents, and, in several of their communications with the Greek authorities, styled themselves representatives of the people of England-not one in a thousand of whom knew or cared anything about them. We question, indeed, if the most fully empowered diplomatist that ever figured in ambassadorial annals, ever exhibited airs of such importance, or ventured to meddle with such ultra-dictatorial authority, in the affairs of the nation to which he was accredited. If it were not for the lamentable consequences which the interference of these gentlemen has produced among the unfortunate people to whom they were deputed, it would be impossible not to laugh at the blustering impudence of their Bobadil pretensions; but the results have been too melancholy to allow us to indulge in the censure of a laugh, however rigid. In a region torn to pieces by factions, which were destroying themselves and their country much more effectually than either could have been destroyed by the enemy, each of these gentlemen joined a faction, of which he became the most factious, inflaming the savage passions of armed barbarism by all the finished arts derived from long practice amidst the wordy brawls of the most depraved civilization. As if elements of discord did not sufficiently abound, Colonel Stanhope introduced among them the new engine of a licentious press, which he employed against the government and the leaders of parties, exerting all its influence in heightening animosities which were exasperated enough without its assistance, and in scattering new materials for enmity and dissension. His great aspiration was to diffuse this blessing over all Greece, but he succeeded only at two places: at Missolonghi, by the assistance of a renegade Swiss apothecary, against the most anxious remonstrances of the brightest name ever connected with this unhappy contest-and at Athens, against the wishes of every one there, who was at all capable of judging what promised advantage, or mischief, to the cause in which, for its misfortune, the typographical Colonel had embarked.

Besides

Besides this precious boon, it would be hard to say what else Lieutenant-colonel Leicester Stanhope did for the Greeks. His ideas of what he would do were, we admit, magnificent enough. 'A thousand hearts were great within his bosom.'

In some of his letters to Mr. Bowring, he modestly informs his friend that he had, in the short space of one week, arranged for the formation of a corps of artillery; made military preparations for the sieges of Patras, Lepanto, and the Castles of the Gulf, by means of a thousand men, irregular troops, to be paid by Lord Byron; and completed the establishment-firstly, of a free presssecondly, of schools-thirdly, of posts throughout the country-and fourthly, of a dispensary! What was the result of all this boastingQuid feret hic dignum tanto promissor hiatu'?

Why, this :-The corps of artillery was never formed :—instead of having fifty German engineers, there were only five or six. Greek privates, corporals, and sergeants were then to be substituted, with English and German commissioned officers; but, alas! there were no English officers to be found, except a Mr. Parry, who had been in the civil department of our ordnance, and with whom the German officers lost no time in getting up a most edifying dispute about rank and precedence; and, finally, Colonel Stanhope himself broke up the whole arrangement, by giving to Ulysses half the establishment formed at Missolonghi-and this, contrary to the wishes of the Greek government. The irregular troops never had any existence but in the fertile imagination of the Colonel; Patras, the Castles, and Lepanto remain to this day in the hands of the Turks, uninvested; and Missolonghi has been lost.

The arrangement of the posts was managed with not inferior ability. Nobody in Greece but Mr. Stanhope ever thought of the necessity of sending and receiving intelligence with mailcoach speed and regularity: it was, in fact, nothing but the extreme of absurdity to entertain such an idea in a country so situated. Accordingly, all the Colonel's plans here too fell to the ground. It is, however, most worthy of observation, that he who writes with so much ease of sending the post all over the world from the seat of the Greek government, three times a week, could never, in his own person, move a yard through the country without an escort, and that only when he had taken especial care to ascertain that there were no Turks in the way. So that, in fact, the whole result of the efforts of this military gentleman (who, we may remark, en passant, never saw a shot fired, nor ever thought of going near the enemy, or even an armed body of Greeks) was to establish a turbulent press, in spite of the government to which he was accredited, and to stock an apothecary's shop with drugs, transmitted (we believe) by a committee

VOL. XXXV. NO. LXIX.

1. Q

committee of casuistical quakers. Most warlike Captain!' For these services the following tribute of applause was paid by his most reverend and approved good masters of the sagacious committee:

6.66

"Resolved-That the Honourable Colonel Stanhope is entitled to the most grateful thanks of the Committee, for the unwearied zeal, SOUND DISCRETION, and extensive benevolence, manifested by him, while acting as their agent in Greece; and that the Committee anticipates GREAT BENEFITS TO GREECE, from the exertions and suggestions which distinguished his visit to that country, and desires particularly to record and to communicate Irs high approbation of his efforts to promote harmony and a good understanding among the different leaders in Greece: a result greatly advanced by his CONCILIATORY SPIRIT and

SUPERIORITY TO PARTY. CONSIDERATIONS.””

The other envoys of this wonderful committee behaved with almost equal absurdity. Nothing can be more melancholy than the accounts of the squabbles, cowardice, and dissensions which the mutual recriminations of these people are every day bringing to light. Perfectly unpractised in any arts calculated to be of advantage either in the council or the field, they began to quarrel among themselves, instead of facing the enemy, and to draw out plans of government and legislation before they had secured the independence of a parish. With the most profound ignorance of the country and the manners of its inhabitants, the committee wasted six or seven thousand pounds in a project for an arsenal for the manufacture of weapons, to be conducted by English mechanics, in-Greece! It would have had a far better chance of success in Timbuctoo. A dozen respectable mechanics were cruelly seduced to go out on this insane project. The issue was as might have been anticipated by any one of common understanding. These poor men were the objects of jealousy and hatred among the uncivilised people to whom they were sent. They suffered the most horrid usage-were obliged to submit to the most heart-rending privations -were neglected by the government, ill-treated by the populace,

*We venture to apply this epithet to the quakers who subscribed for the relief of the Greeks. The principles of their sect forbid them from supplying any assistance, direct or indirect, to the carrying on of a war; but nothing, it appears, prohibits them from assisting those who suffer by its casualties. Now, as the expense of providing for these casualties forms an item, and no small one, in the expenses of a campaign, it requires, we must continue to think, some very respectable degree of casuistry to distinguish contributions for supporting the hospital-staff, &c., of one of the belligerent parties, from direct war-contributions. If we had heard of any subscriptions from the Friends for wounded Mahometans, we should agree with them that their interference was pure humanity-at present it looks very like taking a side in the contest. And this indirect way of aiding a war, without pretending to know anything about it, is apt to remind us of the story told by Dr. Franklin, of the Philadelphia Quakers, who, when pressed by one of our governors, some seventy or eighty years ago, for a vote of money for gunpowder, refused it; but, having to pass a grant for the purchase of corn, added to the sum requisite for that purpose the money required for the gunpowder also, under the general head of Supplies for corn and other grain. We leave the subscription-case to the consideration of the Escobars of the Yearly Assembly. fired

fired on by the soldiery. One of them died in the utmost wretchedness, and the rest were obliged to fly for their lives!

Did the committee, then, do nothing? The answer is ready. They will immediately favour you with an enumeration of their performances. They sat seven days in the week; they wrote and answered 550,000 letters; they vigorously patronised a plan for destroying the Turkish marine, fabricated by those great naval characters, Mr. Joseph Hume, M.P. for Aberdeen-Mr. John Williams, No. 6, King's Bench Walk, Temple-and Dr. Borthwick Gilchrist, author of The Orienti-occidental-tuitionary-pioneer,' inventor of The Universal Character,' &c. &c.; they transmitted a code of maritime law (maritime law for the people of the Greek islands!) drawn up by Sir James Mackintosh; and, finally, they sent out several printing-presses, lithographic ditto, founts of type, maps and mathematical instruments, plans of government, and panopticon academies! Were not these valuable contributions towards carrying on the war against the Ottoman? Printing→ presses for a nation that cannot read! Constitutions for a country, the purest patriots of which are klephtai, i. e. robbers! Mathematical instruments for people who do not know one cipher from another! and whirligig schools for youth who have hardly a village in which they can rest for a moment without the expectation of having the scymitar at their throats. The annals of Bedlam never furnished anything to parallel this.

But were all the gentlemen of the committee Bedlamites? We fear not: some of them had very lucid intervals, and, when a We have particular wind blew, knew a hawk from a handsaw. already declined going into the details of their money-transactions, but it is a pity not to give the outline.

We are told by official authority that the first loan to the Greeks was for 800,000l.; of which 298,700l. in specie, 9,900l. in stores and ammunition, and in payments for Missolonghi, 2,400l., amounting in all to 311,000l.-far less than half the nominal sum-reached Greece;―the rest being swallowed up in the mysterious transactions of the Alley, which we hope will, in this case at least, not long remain mysteries-expenses of the deputies, sundries, and a paltry balance paid over to a second loan! Even of the 300,000l. remitted, full one-half was expended on the most ridiculous projects; and,' in the melancholy words of the last dying speech and confession of one of these unmasked patriots, 'there is no doubt in our minds that the gold which has been sent to Greece from this country, instead of a blessing, has proved a serious bane.' We must add, that there is no doubt in our minds that the gold of the Greek loan which has remained in this country has been a very convenient thing to the virtuous Philhellenes, who, one may be excused

Q 2

for