r failure was to be judged. With a Government
little more than nominal, having neither authority nor resources, its
executive and legislative branches being openly at variance, and the
supplies that ought to fill its exchequer being intercepted by the
military Chiefs, who, as they were, in most places, collectors of the
revenue, were able to rob by authority;--with that curse of all
popular enterprises, a multiplicity of leaders, each selfishly
pursuing his own objects, and ready to make the sword the umpire of
their claims;--with a fleet furnished by private adventure, and
therefore precarious; and an army belonging rather to its Chiefs than
to the Government, and, accordingly, trusting more to plunder than to
pay;--with all these principles of mischief, and, as it would seem,
ruin at the very heart of the struggle, it had yet persevered, which
was in itself victory, through three trying campaigns; and at this
moment presented, in the midst of all its apparent weakness and
distraction, some elements of success which both accounted for what
had hitherto been effected, and gave a hope, with more favouring
circumstances, of something nobler yet to come.

Besides the never-failing encouragement which the incapacity of their
enemies afforded them, the Greeks derived also from the geographical
conformation of their country those same advantages with which nature
had blessed their great ancestors, and which had contributed mainly
perhaps to the formation, as well as maintenance, of their high
national character. Islanders and mountaineers, they were, by their
very position, heirs to the blessings of freedom and commerce; nor
had the spirit of either, through all their long slavery and
sufferings, ever wholly died away. They had also, luckily, in a
political as well as religious point of view, preserved that sacred
line of distinction between themselves and their conquerors which a
fond fidelity to an ancient church could alone have maintained for
them;--keeping thus holily in reserve, against the hour of struggle,
that most stirring of all the excitements to which Freedom can appeal
when she points to her flame rising out of the censer of Religion. In
addition to these, and all the other moral advantages included in
them, for which the Greeks were indebted to their own nature and
position, is to be taken also into account the aid and sympathy they
had every right to expect from others, as soon as their exertions in
their own