I

"And now for the sinews of war. thank you and Mr. Barff for your ready answers, which, next to ready money, is a pleasant thing. Besides the assets and balance, and the relics of the Corgialegno correspondence with Leghorn and Genoa, (I sold the dog flour, tell him, but not at his price,) I shall request and require, from the beginning of March ensuing, about five thousand dollars every two months, i. e. about twenty-five thousand within the current year, at regular intervals, independent of the sums now negotiating. I can show you documents to prove that these are considerably within my supplies for the year in more ways than one; but I do not like to tell the Greeks exactly what I could or would advance on an emergency, because otherwise, they will double and triple their demands (a disposition that they have already sufficiently shown) and though I am willing to do all I can when necessary, yet I do not see why they should not help a little; for they are not quite so bare as they pretend to be by

:

some accounts.

"February 7. 1824.

·

617

"Well, it seems that I am to be Commander-in-Chief, and the post is by no means a sinecure, for we are not what Major Sturgeon calls a set of the most amicable officers.' Whether we shall have a boxing bout between Captain Sheers and the Colonel,' I cannot tell; but, between Suliote chiefs, German barons, English volunteers, and adventurers of all nations, we are likely to form as goodly an allied army as ever quarrelled beneath the same banner.

"February 8. 1824.

Interrupted again by business yesterday, and it is time to conclude my letter. I drew some time since on Mr. Barff for a thousand dollars, to complete some money wanted by the Government. The said Government got cash on that bill here, and at a profit; but the very same fellow who gave it to them, after proposing to give me money for other bills on Barff to the amount of thirteen hundred dollars, either could not, or thought better of it. I had written to Barff advising him, but had afterwards to write to tell him of the fellow's having not come up to time. "I have been interrupted by the arrival of You must really send me the balance soon. Parry, and afterwards by the return of Hes- I have the artillerists and my Suliotes to keth, who has not brought an answer to my pay, and Heaven knows what besides; and epistles, which rather surprises me. You as every thing depends upon punctuality, all will write soon, I suppose. Parry seems a our operations will be at a stand-still unless fine rough subject, but will hardly be ready you use despatch. I shall send to Mr. Barff for the field these three weeks; he and I or to you further bills on England for three will (I think) be able to draw together, at thousand pounds, to be nogotiated as speedleast, I will not interfere with or contradict ily as you can. I have already stated here him in his own department. He complains and formerly the sums I can command at grievously of the mercantile and enthusymusy home within the year, without including part of the Committee, but greatly praises my credits, or the bills already negotiated or Gordon and Hume. Gordon would have negotiating, as Corgialegno's balance of Mr. given three or four thousand pounds and Webb's letter, and my letters from my come out himself, but Kennedy or somebody friends (received by Mr. Parry's vessel) conelse disgusted him, and thus they have spoil-firm what I have already stated. How much ed part of their subscription and cramped their operations. Parry says B✶✶ ✶ is a humbug, to which I say nothing. He sorely laments the printing and civilising expenses, and wishes that there was not a Sundayschool in the world, or any school here at present, save and except always an academy for artilleryship.

'He complained also of the cold, a little to my surprise; firstly, because, there being no chimneys, I have used myself to do with out other warmth than the animal heat and one's cloak, in these parts; and, secondly, because I should as soon have expected to hear a volcano sneeze, as a firemaster (who is to burn a whole fleet) exclaim against the atmosphere. I fully expected that his very approach would have scorched up the town like the burning-glasses of Archimedes.

I may require in the course of the year I can't tell, but I will take care that it shall not exceed the means to supply it.

"Yours ever,

N. B.

"P. S.-I have had, by desire of a Mr. Jerostati, to draw on Demetrius Delladecima (is it our friend in ultima analise?) to pay the Committee expenses. I really do not understand what the Committee mean by some of their freedoms. Parry and I get on very well hitherto how long this may last, Heaven knows, but I hope it will, for a good deal for the Greek service depends upon it; but he has already had some miffs with Col. S., and I do all I can to keep the peace amongst them. However, Parry is a fine fellow, extremely active, and of strong, sound, practical talents, by all accounts. Enclosed are bills for three thousand pounds, drawn

“February 9. 1824. "P. S. 2d or 3d. I have reason to ex-lowing letter :pect a person from England directed with papers (on business) for me to sign, somewhere in the Islands, by and by if such should arrive, would you forward him to me by a safe conveyance, as the papers regard a transaction with regard to the adjustment of a lawsuit, and a sum of several thousand pounds, which I, or my bankers and trustees for me, may have to receive (in England) in consequence. The time of the probable arrival I cannot state, but the date of my letters is the 2d Nov., and I suppose that he ought to arrive soon.'

had been put in progress both by the appointment of a brigade of Suliotes to act under Lord Byron, and by the formation, at the joint expense of his Lordship and Colonel Stanhope, of a small corps of artillery.

It was towards the latter end of January, as we have seen, that Lord Byron received his regular commission from the Government, as Commander of the expedition. In conferring upon him full powers, both civil and military, they appointed, at the same time, a Military Council to accompany him, composed of the most experienced Chieftains of the army, with Nota Bozzari, the uncle of the famous warrior, at their head.

619

management than themselves. "There were," says Count Gamba, "six heads of families among them, all of whom had equal pretensions both by their birth their and exploits; and none of whom would obey any one of his comrades."

A serious riot to which, about the middle of January, these Suliotes had given rise, and in which some lives were lost, had been a source of much irritation and anxiety to Lord Byron, as well from the ill-blood it was likely to engender between his troops and the citizens, as from the little dependence it gave him encouragement to place upon materials so unmanageable. Notwithstanding all this, however, neither his eagerness nor his efforts for the accomplishment of this sole personal object of his ambition ever relaxed a single instant. To whatever little glory was to be won by the attack upon Lepanto, he looked forward as his only reward for all the sacrifices he was making. In his conversations with Count Gamba on the sub

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It had been expected that, among the stores sent with Parry, there would be a supply of Congreve rockets,—an instrument of warfare of which such wonders had been related to the Greeks as filled their imaginations with the most absurd ideas of its powers. Their disappointment, therefore, on finding that the engineer had come unprovided with these missiles was excessive.ject, "though he joked a good deal," says Another hope, too,—that of being enabled to complete an artillery corps by the accession of those Germans who had been sent for into the Morea, -was found almost equally fallacious; that body of men having, from the death or retirement of those who originally composed it, nearly dwindled away; and the few officers that now came to serve being, from their fantastic notions of rank and etiquette, far more troublesome than useful. In addition to these discouraging circumstances, the five Speziot ships of war which had for some time formed the sole protection of Missolonghi were now returned to their home, and had left their places to be filled by the enemy's squadron.

Perplexing as were all these difficulties in the way of the expedition, a still more formidable embarrassment presented itself in the turbulent and almost mutinous disposition of those Suliote troops on whom he mainly depended for success in his undertaking. Presuming as well upon his wealth and generosity as upon their own military importance, these unruly warriors had never ceased to rise in the extravagance of their demands upon him ;- the wholly destitute and homeless state of their families at this moment affording but too well-founded a pretext both for their exaction and discontent. Nor were their leaders much more amenable to

This brave Morlote, when Lord Byron first knew him, was particularly boyish in his aspect and manners, but still cherished, under this exterior, a mature spirit of patriotism which occasionally broke forth; and the noble poet used to relate that, one day, while they were playing at draughts together, on the name of Riga being

this gentleman, “ about his post of Archistrategos,' or Commander-in-Chief, it was plain that the romance and the peril of the undertaking were great allurements to him." When we combine, indeed, his determination to stand, at all hazards, by the cause, with the very faint hopes his sagacious mind would let him indulge as to his power of serving it, I have little doubt that the "soldier's grave" which, in his own beautiful verses, he marked out for himself, was no idle dream of poetry; but that, on the contrary, his "wish was father to the thought," and that to an honourable death, in some such achievement as that of storming Lepanto, he looked forward, not only as the sole means of redeeming worthily the great pledge he had now given, but as the most signal and lasting service that a name like his,-echoed, as it would then be, among the watch-words of Liberty, from age to age, could bequeath to her

cause.

In the midst of these cares he was much gratified by the receipt of a letter from an old friend of his, Andrea Londo, whom he had made acquaintance with in his early travels in 1809, and who was at that period a rich proprietor, under the Turks, in the Morea.1 This patriotic Greek was one of the foremost to raise the standard of the Cross; and at the present moment stood

pronounced, Londo leaped from the table, and clapping
violently his hands, began singing the famous song of that
ill-fated patriot:-

"Sons of the Greeks, arise !
The glorious hour's gone forth."

distinguished among the supporters of the Legislative Body and of the new National Government. The following is a translation of Lord Byron's answer to his letter."

LETTER 542.

"Dear Friend,

TO LONDO.

him to be an enemy to the press, although he dared not openly to avow it. His Lordship then said that he had not made up his mind about the liberty of the press in Greece, but that he thought the experiment worth trying."

That between two men, both eager in the service of one common cause, there should The sight of your handwriting gave arise a difference of opinion as to the means me the greatest pleasure. Greece has ever of serving it, is but à natural result of the been for me, as it must be for all men of any varieties of human judgment, and detracts feeling or education, the promised land of nothing from the zeal or sincerity of either. valour, of the arts, and of liberty; nor did But by those who do not suffer themselves the time I passed in my youth in travelling to be carried away by a theory, it will be among her ruins at all chill my affection for conceded, I think, that the scruples professed the birthplace of heroes. In addition to this, by Lord Byron, with respect to the expeI am bound to yourself by ties of friendship dience or safety of introducing what is called and gratitude for the hospitality which I ex- a Free Press into a country so little advanced perienced from you during my stay in that in civilisation as Greece, were founded on country, of which you are now become one just views of human nature and practical of the first defenders and ornaments. To good sense. To endeavour to force upon a see myself serving, by your side and under state of society, so unprepared for them, your eyes, in the cause of Greece, will be to such full-grown institutions; to think of me one of the happiest events of my life. In engrafting, at once, on an ignorant people the mean time, with the hope of our again the fruits of long knowledge and cultivation, meeting, -of importing among them, ready made, those advantages and blessings which no nation ever attained but by its own working out, nor ever was fitted to enjoy but by having first struggled for them; to harbour even a dream of the success of such an experiment, implies a sanguineness almost incredible, and such as, though, in the present instance, indulged by the political economist and soldier, was, as we have seen, beyond the poet.

"I am, as ever, &c."

Among the less serious embarrassments of his position at this period, may be mentioned the struggle maintained against him by his colleague, Colonel Stanhope, with a degree of conscientious perseverance which, even while thwarted by it, he could not but respect, on the subject of a Free Press, which it was one of the favourite objects of his fellow-agent to bring instantly into operation in all parts of Greece. On this important point their opinions differed considerably; and the following report, by Colonel Stanhope, of one of their many conversations on the subject, may be taken as a fair and concise statement of their respective views:

66

Lord Byron said that he was an ardent friend of publicity and the press; but that he feared it was not applicable to this society in its present combustible state. I answered that I thought it applicable to all countries, and essential here, in order to put an end to the state of anarchy which at present prevailed. Lord B. feared libels and licentiousness. I said that the object of a free press was to check public licentiousness, and to expose libellers to odium. Lord B. had mentioned his conversation with Mavrocordato to show that the Prince was not hostile to the press. I declared that I knew

I Lord Byron had, it seems, acknowledged, on the preceding evening, his having remarked to Prince Mavrocordato, that "if he were in his situation, he would have

- such

The enthusiastic and, in many respects, well-founded confidence with which Colonel Stanhope appealed to the authority of Mr. Bentham on most of the points at issue between himself and Lord Byron, was, from that natural antipathy which seems to exist between political economists and poets, but little sympathised in by the latter; appeals being always met by him with those sallies of ridicule, which he found the besthumoured vent for his impatience under argument, and to which, notwithstanding the venerable name and services of Mr. Bentham himself, the quackery of much that is promulgated by his followers presented, it must be owned, ample scope. Romantic, indeed, as was Lord Byron's sacrifice of himself, to the cause of Greece, there was in the views he took of the means of serving her not a tinge of the unsubstantial or speculative. The grand practical task of freeing her from

placed the press under a censor ;" to which the Prince had replied, "No; the liberty of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution."