[Footnote 1: The generous zeal with which he applied himself to this important object will be understood from the following statement:--"On reporting to Lord Byron what I thought might be done, he ordered me to draw up a plan for putting the fortifications in thorough repair, and to accompany it with an estimate of the expense. It was agreed that I should make the estimate only one third of what I thought would be the actual expense; and if that third could be procured from the magistrates, Lord Byron undertook secretly to pay the remainder."] With that thanklessness which too often waits on disinterested actions, it has been sometimes tauntingly remarked, and in quarters from whence a more generous judgment might be expected [1], that, after all, Lord Byron effected but little for Greece:--as if much _could_ be effected by a single individual, and in so short a time, for a cause which, fought as it has been almost incessantly through the six years since his death, has required nothing less than the intervention of all the great Powers of Europe to give it a chance of success, and, even so, has not yet succeeded. That Byron himself was under no delusion as to the importance of his own solitary aid,--that he knew, in a struggle like this, there must be the same prodigality of means towards one great end as is observable in the still grander operations of nature, where individuals are as nothing in the tide of events,--that such was his, at once, philosophic and melancholy view of his own sacrifices, I have, I trust, clearly shown. But that, during this short period of action, he did not do well and wisely all that man could achieve in the time, and under the circumstances, is an assertion which the noble facts here recorded fully and triumphantly disprove. He knew that, placed as he was, his measures, to be wise, must be prospective, and from the nature of the seeds thus sown by him, the benefits that were to be expected must be judged. To reconcile the rude chiefs to the Government and to each other;--to infuse a spirit of humanity, by his example, into their warfare;--to prepare the way for the employment of the expected Loan, in a manner most calculated to call forth the resources of the country;--to put the fortifications of Missolonghi in such a state of repair as might, and eventually _did_, render it proof against the besieger;--to prevent those infractions of neutrality, so tempting to the Greeks, which brought their Government in collision with the Ionian authorities[2], and to restrain all such license of the Press as might indispose the Courts of Europe to their cause:--such were the important objects which he had proposed to himself to accomplish, and towards which, in this brief interval, and in the midst of such dissensions and hinderances, he had already made considerable and most promising progress. But it would be unjust to close even here the bright catalogue of his services. It is, after all, _not_ with