try and music. Gamba was waiting him.
His vessel, the "Bombarda," had been taken by the Ottoman frigate, but the
captain of the latter, recognizing the Count as having formerly saved his
life in the Black Sea, made interest in his behalf with Yussuf Pasha at
Patras, and obtained his discharge. In recompense, the poet subsequently
sent to the Pasha some Turkish prisoners, with a letter requesting him to
endeavour to mitigate the inhumanities of the war. Byron brought to the
Greeks at Mesolonghi the 4000_l_. of his personal loan (applied, in the
first place, to defraying the expenses of the fleet), with the spell of
his name and presence. He was shortly afterwards appointed to the command
of the intended expedition against Lepanto, and, with this view, again
took into his pay five hundred Suliotes. An approaching general assembly
to organize the forces of the west, had brought together a motley crew,
destitute, discontented, and more likely to wage war upon each other than
on their enemies. Byron's closest associates during the ensuing months,
were the engineer Parry, an energetic artilleryman, "extremely active, and
of strong practical talents," who had travelled in America, and Colonel
Stanhope (afterwards Lord Harrington) equally with himself devoted to the
emancipation of Greece, but at variance about the means of achieving it.
Stanhope, a moral enthusiast of the stamp of Kennedy, beset by the fallacy
of religious missions, wished to cover the Morea with Wesleyan tracts, and
liberate the country by the agency of the Press. He had imported a
converted blacksmith, with a cargo of Bibles, types, and paper, who on
20_l_. a year, undertook to accomplish the reform. Byron, backed by the
good sense of Mavrocordatos, proposed to make cartridges of the tracts,
and small shot of the type; he did not think that the turbulent tribes
were ripe for freedom of the press, and had begun to regard Republicanism
itself as a matter of secondary moment. The disputant allies in the common
cause occupied each a flat of the same small house, the soldier by
profession was bent on writing the Turks down, the poet on fighting them
down, holding that "the work of the sword must precede that of the pen,
and that camps must be the training schools of freedom." Their
altercations were sometimes fierce--"Despot!" cried Stanhope, "after
professing liberal principles from boyhood, you when called to act prove
yourself a Turk." "Radical!" retorted Byron,