After paying the fleet, which indeed had only come out in the expectation of receiving the arrears from the loan he had promised to Mavrocordato, he resolved to form a brigade of Suliotes.  Five hundred of the remains of Marco Botzaris’s gallant followers were accordingly taken into his pay.  “He burns with military ardour and chivalry,” says Colonel Stanhope, “and will proceed with the expedition to Lepanto.”  But the expedition was delayed by causes which ought to have been foreseen.

The Suliotes, conceiving that in his Lordship they had found a patron whose wealth and generosity were equally boundless, refused to quit Missolonghi till their arrears were paid.  Savage in the field, and untamable in the city, they became insubordinate and mercenary; nor was their conduct without excuse.  They had long defended the town with untired bravery; their families had been driven into it in the most destitute condition; and all the hopes that had led them to take up arms were still distant and prospective.  Besides, Mavrocordato, unlike the other Grecian captains, having no troops of his own, affected to regard these mercenaries as allies, and was indulgent to their excesses.  The town was overawed by their turbulence, conflicts took place in the street; riot and controversy everywhere prevailed, and blood was shed.

Lord Byron’s undisciplined spirit could ill brook delay; he partook of the general vehemence, and lost the power of discerning the comparative importance both of measures and things.  He was out of his element; confusion thickened around him; his irritability grew into passion; and there was the rush and haste, the oblivion and alarm of fatality in all he undertook and suggested.

One day, a party of German adventurers reached the fortress so demoralized by hardships, that few of them were fit for service.  It was intended to form a corps of artillery, and these men were destined for that branch of the service; but their condition was such, that Stanhope doubted the practicability of carrying the measure into effect at that time.  He had promised to contribute a hundred pounds to their equipment.  Byron attributed the Colonel’s objections to reluctance to pay the money; and threatened him if it were refused, with a punishment, new in Grecian war——­to libel him in the Greek Chronicle! a newspaper which Stanhope had recently established.

It is, however, not easy to give a correct view of the state of affairs at that epoch in Missolonghi.  All parties seem to have been deplorably incompetent to understand the circumstances in which they were placed;—­the condition of the Greeks, and that their exigencies required only physical and military means.  They talked of newspapers and types, and libels, as if the moral instruments of civil exhortation were adequate to wrench the independence of Greece from the bloody grasp of the Ottoman.  No wonder that Byron, accustomed to the management only of his own fancies, was fluttered amid the conflicts of such riot and controversy.