'However bitterly his pen may have lashed the vices and follies of his day, it is not the least honourable trait in our national character that neither personal dislike nor those prejudices which arise from literary jealousy and political animosity prevent us from duly appreciating departed worth, and even forgetting those aberrations to which all are more or less liable in this state of imperfection and fallibility.' The following extracts are taken from Lord Broughton's 'Recollections of a Long Life,' a work that was printed, but not published, in 1865. As the opinions of Byron's life-long friend, John Cam Hobhouse, they cannot fail to interest the reader:[27] 'How much soever the Greeks of that day may have differed on other topics, there was no difference of opinion in regard to the loss they had sustained by the death of Byron. Those who have read Colonel Leicester Stanhope's interesting volume, "Greece in 1823 and 1824," and more particularly Colonel Stanhope's "Sketch" and Mr. Finlay's "Reminiscences" of Byron, will have seen him just as he appeared to me during our long intimacy. I liked him a great deal too well to be an impartial judge of his character; but I can confidently appeal to the impressions he made upon the two above-mentioned witnesses of his conduct, under very trying circumstances, for a justification of my strong affection for him--an affection not weakened by the forty years of a busy and chequered life that have passed over me since I saw him laid in his grave. 'The influence he had acquired in Greece was unbounded, and he had exerted it in a manner most useful to her cause. Lord Sidney Osborne, writing to Mrs. Leigh, said that, if Byron had never written a line in his life, he had done enough, during the last six months in Greece, to immortalize his name. He added that no one unacquainted with the circumstances of the case could have any idea of the difficulties he had overcome. He had reconciled the contending parties, and had given a character of humanity and civilization to the warfare in which they were engaged, besides contriving to prevent them from offending their powerful neighbours in the Ionian Islands.