ation of Lord Cochrane as First Admiral of Greece. This was done
on the 18th of April. Landing for the first time on the continent, Lord
Cochrane proceeded in state on horseback for the distance of a mile and
a-half that was between the shore and the lemon-grove. At the entrance
he was met by Kolokotrones, who embraced him, saying, "You are welcome;"
words that were repeated by many other leading Greeks, who attended and
conducted him into the centre of the grove. There he was formally
introduced to the delegates as the First Admiral. Through an interpreter
he addressed to them a few sentences, urging the necessity of continued
harmony, and of a prompt expedition against the Turks, to be conducted
both by sea and by land. After that, placing his hand on the hilt of his
sword, he took the necessary oath: "I swear to shed my blood for the
safety of the Greeks and for the liberation of their country; I swear
that I will not abandon their cause so long as they do not themselves
abandon it, but sustain my efforts."

The election of Sir Richard Church as Generalissimo of the Land Forces
was, in like manner, completed on the 15th of April.

The essential business for which Lord Cochrane had desired that the
united National Assembly should meet at Troezene being now accomplished,
he hoped that it would speedily adjourn, in order that the military
leaders should be enabled to proceed at once to the work pressing
urgently upon them. "The critical moment," said Lord Cochrane, in a
letter addressed to them on the 16th of April, "has arrived in which you
are called upon to decide whether the population of Greece shall be
annihilated or enslaved, your country peopled with barbarous hordes, and
the name of Greece blotted out from the list of independent nations."
The National Assembly, however, spent more than another month in idle
discussions, and in disputing upon matters the settlement of which ought
to have been postponed to a less perilous time. Again and again Lord
Cochrane had to impress upon them the necessity, in war as in council,
of prompt and united action; but with very poor result.

"Once more I address you by letter," he wrote a few days later, "in the
hope that you may be persuaded instantly to take measures to save your
country from the ruin which protracted deliberations must at the present
moment entail--ay, with as much certainty as a continuance of those
dissensions which have hitherto so unhappily prevailed; and