slow. To
convince the government and the chiefs of the paralysing effect of their
dissensions, to inculcate the spirit of union, to endeavour to humanise
the feelings of the belligerents on both sides, so as to take from the
war the character of barbarism--these, with the generous aid of his
money, were the objects of his interference.

At length the time for action arrived, and, leaving Cephalonia, Byron
landed at Missolonghi on January 4, 1824. He was welcomed with all
honour, and at the end of the month received a formal commission from
the government as commander of the expedition against Lepanto, a
fortified town. This design was a failure, and Byron occupied himself
with the fortification of Missolonghi, and with the formation of a
brigade for the next campaign.

But his health had lately been giving way; he was living in little
better than a swamp; and one day, after exposure to a heavy shower, he
was seized with acute pains. On April 11, the illness, now recognised as
rheumatic fever, increased, and on the 19th he was no more. The funeral
took place in the Church of St. Nicholas, Missolonghi, on April 22, and
the remains were carried to England on the brig Florida, and buried,
close to those of his mother, in the village church of Hucknall.

_V.--A Bewildering Personality_

Can I clear away some of the mists that hang round my friend, and show
him as worthy of love as he was of admiration? The task is not an easy
one. In most minds some one influence governs, from which all secondary
impulses are found to radiate, but this pivot of character was wanting
to Lord Byron. Governed at different moments by totally different
passions, and impelled sometimes, as in his excess of parsimony in
Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his nature, he
presents the strangest contradictions and inconsistencies, a bewildering
complication of qualities.

So various, indeed, were his moral and intellectual attributes, that he
may be pronounced to have been not one, but many. It was this multiform
aspect that led the world to compare him with a medley host of
personages: "within nine years," as he playfully records, "to Rousseau,
Goethe, Young, Aretino, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, Satan,
Shakespeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Harlequin, Henry VIII., Mirabeau, Michael Angelo, Diogenes, Milton,
Alfieri, and many others."

But this very versatility, which renders it so diffi