Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston in 1801, and was thus just twenty years old when the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821. In that year he was graduated at Brown University, Providence, and thereafter studied medicine for three years in Boston. Byron’s poems had prepared the youths of Europe and of America for the Greek struggle, and Howe was one of the young men who responded in person to Byron’s final call to arms. Howe did not reach Greece till a few months after Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824. Howe spent six years in campaigning with the Greek patriots. He had enlisted in the capacity of a surgeon; but the exigencies of the primitive and very severe guerilla warfare tended to obliterate official rank and to throw the work upon those who had executive ability. The war was a scramble of patriot banditti and peasant militia against Mahommetan ruffians. The name of Greece, the name of Byron, the beauty of the scenery in whose midst the war proceeded, the heart-rending nature of the struggle and its happy outcome, all combine to make this the most romantic war in history. It was one of the last wars before that effective development of steam and gunpowder which have forever merged the picturesque in the horrible. The young Howe kept a journal, which shows a character entirely at one with his rapturously poetic surroundings. Before I had read this journal I did not know that the United States had ever produced a man of this type, the seventeenth century navigator, whose daily life is made up of hair-breadth escapes and who writes in the style of Robinson Crusoe.--“Passed a pirate boat, but he saw too many marks of preparation about us to attack us; in fact, if vessels only knew what cowards these pirates are they would never be robbed, for the least resistance will keep them off. Give me a vessel with moderately high sides, two light guns and twelve resolute men, and I would pledge my all on sailing about every port of the archipelago and beating off every vessel which approaches. The pirates always come in long, light, open boats which pull from sixteen to thirty-six and forty oars. They sometimes have a gun, and always select calm weather to attack. But how to get up the sides of a vessel if twelve men with cutlasses were to oppose them.”... “But it was a great fault on the part of commanders of vessels of war not to have made examples. A few bodies hanging at their yard-arms, and displayed round among the islands, would have had more effect than all they have done.”...