But all these facts of history, or institutions of policy, nay, even the more violent appeals to the national pride in such memorable transactions as the expatriation of the illustrious Suliotes (as also of some eminent predatory chieftains from the Morea), were, after all, no more than indirect excitements of the insurrectionary spirit. If it were possible that any adequate occasion should arise for combining the Greeks in one great movement of resistance, such continued irritations must have the highest value, as keeping alive the national spirit, which must finally be relied on to improve it and to turn it to account; but it was not to be expected that any such local irritations could ever of themselves avail to create an occasion of sufficient magnitude for imposing silence on petty dissensions, and for organizing into any unity of effort a country so splintered and naturally cut into independent chambers as that of Greece. That task, transcending the strength (as might seem) of any real agencies or powers then existing in Greece, was assumed by a mysterious, [Footnote: Epirus and Acarnania, etc., to the north-west; Roumelia, Thebes, Attica, to the east; the Morea, or Peloponnesus, to the south-west; and the islands so widely dispersed in the Egean, had from position a separate interest over and above their common interest as members of a Christian confederacy. And in the absence of some great representative society, there was no voice commanding enough to merge the local interest in the universal one of Greece. The original (or _Philomuse_ society), which adopted literature for its ostensible object, as a mask to its political designs, expired at Munich in 1807; but not before it had founded a successor more directly political. Hence arose a confusion, under which many of the crowned heads in Europe were judged uncharitably as dissemblers or as traitors to their engagements. They had subscribed to the first society; but they reasonably held that this did not pledge them to another, which, though inheriting the secret purposes of the first, no longer masked or disavowed them.] and, in some sense, a fictitious society of corresponding members, styling itself the _Hetæria_. A more astonishing case of mighty effects prepared and carried on to their accomplishment by small means, magnifying their own extent through great zeal and infinite concealment, and artifices the most subtle, is not to be found in history. The _secret tribunal_ of the middle ages is not to be compared with it for the depth and expansion of its combinations, or for the impenetrability of its masque. Nor is there in the whole annals of man a manoeuvre so admirable as that, by which this society, silently effecting its own transfiguration, and recasting as in a crucible its own form, organs, and most essential functions, contrived, by mere force of seasonable silence, or by the very pomp of mystery, to carry over from the first or innoxious model of the Hetæria, to its new