EKS.--IBRAHIM AND HIS
SUCCESSES.--MAVROCORDATOS'S LETTER TO LORD COCHRANE.

[1820-1825.]

While Lord Cochrane was rendering efficient service to the cause of
freedom in South America, another war of independence was being waged
in Europe; and he had hardly been at home a week before solicitations
pressed upon him from all quarters that he should lend his great name
and great abilities to this war also. As he consented to do so, and
almost from the moment of his arrival was intimately connected with
the Greek Revolution, the previous stages of this memorable episode,
the incidents that occurred during his absence in Chili and Brazil,
need to be here reviewed and recapitulated.

The Greek Revolution began openly in 1821. But there had been long
previous forebodings of it. The dwellers in the land once peopled by
the noble race which planned and perfected the arts and graces, the
true refinements and the solid virtues that are the basis of our
modern civilization, had been for four centuries and more the slaves
of the Turks. They were hardly Greeks, if by that name is implied
descent from the inhabitants of classic Greece. With the old stock had
been blended, from generation to generation, so many foreign elements
that nearly all trace of the original blood had disappeared, and the
modern Greeks had nothing but their residence and their language to
justify them in maintaining the old title. But their slavery was only
too real. Oppressed by the Ottomans on account of their race and their
religion, the oppression was none the less in that it induced many of
them to cast off the last shreds of freedom and deck themselves in the
coarser, but, to slavish minds, the pleasanter bondage of trickery and
meanness. During the eighteenth century, many Greeks rose to eminence
in the Turkish service, and proved harder task-masters to their
brethren than the Turks themselves generally were. The hope of further
aggrandisement, however, led them to scheme the overthrow of their
Ottoman employers, and their projects were greatly aided by the truer,
albeit short-sighted, patriotism that animated the greater number of
their kinsmen. They groaned under Turkish thraldom, and yearned to
be freed from it, in the temper so well described and so worthily
denounced by Lord Byron in 1811:--

"And many dream withal the hour is nigh
That gives them back their fathers' heritage:
For foreign arms and aid they loudly sigh,
Nor solely dare