ough they do of one another."

It was chiefly at Byron's instigation that the first Greek loan was
contracted, in London, early in 1824. Its proceeds, 300,000_l._, were
spent partly in unprofitable outlay upon ships, ammunition, and the
like, of which the people were in no position to make good use, but
mostly in civil war and in pandering to the greed and vanity of the
members of the Government and their subordinate officials. "Phanariots
and doctors in medicine," says an eye-witness, "who, in the month
of April, 1824, were clad in ragged coats, and who lived on scanty
rations, threw off that patriotic chrysalis before summer was past,
and emerged in all the splendour of brigand life, fluttering about in
rich Albanian habiliments, refulgent with brilliant and unused arms,
and followed by diminutive pipe-bearers and tall henchmen."[A]

[Footnote A: Finky, vol. ii. p. 39.]

Even the scanty allowance made by the Greek Government out of its
newly-acquired wealth for fighting purposes was for the most part
squandered almost as frivolously. One general who drew pay and rations
for seven hundred soldiers went to fight and die at Sphakteria at
the head of seventeen armed peasants.[A] And that is only a glaring
instance of peculations that were all but universal.

[Footnote A: Trikoupes, vol. iii., p. 206.]

That being the degradation to which the leaders of the Greek
Revolution had sunk, it is not strange that its gains in previous
years should have begun in 1824 to be followed by heavy losses. The
Greek people--the peasants and burghers--were still patriots, though
ill-trained and misdirected. They could defend their own homesteads
with unsurpassed heroism, and hold their own mountains and valleys
with fierce persistency. But they were unfit for distant fighting,
even when their chiefs consented to employ them in it. Sultan Mahmud,
therefore, who had been profiting by the hard experience of former
years, and whose strength had been steadily growing while the power
of the insurgents had been rapidly weakening, entered on a new and
successful policy. He left the Greeks to waste their energies in their
own possessions, and resolved to recapture, one after another, the
outposts and ill-protected islands. For this he took especial care
in augmenting his navy, and, besides developing his own resources,
induced his powerful and turbulent vassal, Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of
Egypt, to equip a formidable fleet and entrust it to his