Though he had but a poor opinion of his colleagues, he was thoroughly in earnest about the cause. He had always hated bullying, and the Turks were bullies. He was always at war with hypocrites--and it seemed to him that an absolute government was an organised hypocrisy. It was not necessary, therefore, for him to love revolutionists in order to be willing to help them to work out their salvation; and he certainly did not love the Greeks. It is recorded that he gave up keeping a diary because he found so much abuse of the Greeks creeping into it; and he sometimes spoke of them with excessive bitterness: "I am of St. Paul's opinion," he said, "that there is no difference between Jews and Greeks, the character of both being equally vile;" and his conduct, at the beginning of his expedition, was somewhat of a disappointment to romantic people. The eyes of romantic Europe were upon him, and far too much was expected from the magic of his presence and his name. He would, at once, people thought, raise an army and march to Constantinople. Arriving before Constantinople, he would blow a trumpet, and the walls of the city would fall down flat. "Instead of which," they complained, he had settled down comfortably in a villa in the Ionian Islands, and was writing a fresh canto of "Don Juan." But that was not true. Byron was, indeed, living in a villa--for even a romantic poet must live somewhere; but the only poetry which he wrote in his villa was a war song. For the rest, he was wisely trying to master the situation before committing himself--refusing to stir before he saw his way. For the situation was, just then, far from satisfactory. Their initial successes had turned the heads of the Greeks, and now their leaders were at loggerheads. Each of them was anxious to secure Byron's help, not for a nation, but for a faction, and to engage him, not in revolt against the common enemy, but in internecine strife. As Finlay puts it: "To nobody did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and self-deceit so candidly.... Kolokrotones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island. Constantine Metaxa, who was Governor of Missolonghi, wrote saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petra Bey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds."