of achieving it.  Stanhope, a moral enthusiast of the stamp of Kennedy, beset by the fallacy of religious missions, wished to cover the Morea with Wesleyan tracts, and liberate the country by the agency of the Press.  He had imported a converted blacksmith, with a cargo of Bibles, types, and paper, who on 20_l_. a year, undertook to accomplish the reform.  Byron, backed by the good sense of Mavrocordatos, proposed to make cartridges of the tracts, and small shot of the type; he did not think that the turbulent tribes were ripe for freedom of the press, and had begun to regard Republicanism itself as a matter of secondary moment.  The disputant allies in the common cause occupied each a flat of the same small house, the soldier by profession was bent on writing the Turks down, the poet on fighting them down, holding that “the work of the sword must precede that of the pen, and that camps must be the training schools of freedom.”  Their altercations were sometimes fierce—­“Despot!” cried Stanhope, “after professing liberal principles from boyhood, you when called to act prove yourself a Turk.”  “Radical!” retorted Byron, “if I had held up my finger I could have crushed your press,”—­but this did not prevent the recognition by each of them of the excellent qualities of the other.

Ultimately Stanhope went to Athens, and allied himself with Trelawny and Odysseus and the party of the Left.  Nothing can be more statesmanlike than some of Byron’s papers of this and the immediately preceding period; nothing more admirable than the spirit which inspires them.  He had come into the heart of a revolution, exposed to the same perils as those which had wrecked the similar movement in Italy.  Neither trusting too much nor distrusting too much, with a clear head and a good will he set about enforcing a series of excellent measures.  From first to last he was engaged in denouncing dissension, in advocating unity, in doing everything that man could do to concentrate and utilize the disorderly elements with which he had to work.  He occupied himself in repairing fortifications, managing ships, restraining licence, promoting courtesy between the foes, and regulating the disposal of the sinews of war.

On the morning of the 22nd of January, his last birthday, he came from his room to Stanhope’s, and said, smiling, “You were complaining that I never write any poetry now,” and read the familiar stanzas beginning—­

  ’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,

and ending—­

  Seek out—­less often sought than found—­
    A soldier’s grave, for thee the best;
  Then look around, and choose thy ground,
        And take thy rest.

High thoughts, high resolves; but the brain that was over-tasked, and the frame that was outworn, would be tasked and worn little longer.  The lamp of a life that had burnt too fiercely was flickering to its close.  “If we are not taken off with the sword,” he writes on February 5th, “we are like to march off with an ague in this mud basket; and, to conclude with a very bad pun, better martially than marsh-ally.  The dykes of Holland when broken down are the deserts of Arabia, in comparison with Mesolonghi.”  In April, when it was too late, Stanhope wrote from Salona, in Phocis, imploring him not to sacrifice health, and perhaps life, “in that bog.”