bright, erroneous dream,—­false in the general principles on which it proceeded, though beautiful and attaching in most of the details.  Had full time been allowed for the “over-light” of his imagination to have been tempered down by the judgment which, in him, was still in reserve, the world at large would have been taught to pay that high homage to his genius which those only who saw what he was capable of can now be expected to accord to it.

It was about this time that Mr. Cowell, paying a visit to Lord Byron at Genoa, was told by him that some friends of Mr. Shelley, sitting together one evening, had seen that gentleman, distinctly, as they thought, walk, into a little wood at Lerici, when at the same moment, as they afterwards discovered, he was far away, in quite a different direction.  “This,” added Lord Byron, in a low, awe-struck tone of voice, “was but ten days before poor Shelley died.”

HIS SERVICE IN THE GREEK CAUSE.

With that thanklessness which too often waits on disinterested actions, it has been some times tauntingly remarked, and in quarters from whence a more generous judgment might be expected, that, after all, Lord Byron effected but little for Greece:  as if much could be effected by a single individual, and in so short a time, for a cause which, fought as it has been almost incessantly through the six years since his death, has required nothing less than the intervention of all the great powers of Europe to give it a chance of success, and, even so, has not yet succeeded.  That Byron himself was under no delusion, as to the importance of his own solitary aid—­that he knew, in a struggle like this, there must be the same prodigality of means towards one great end as is observable in the still grander operations of nature, where individuals are as nothing in the tide of events—­that such was his, at once, philosophic and melancholy view of his own sacrifices, I have, I trust, clearly shown.  But that, during this short period of action, he did not do well and wisely all that man could achieve in the time, and under the circumstances, is an assertion which the noble facts here recorded fully and triumphantly disprove.  He knew that, placed as he was, his measures, to be wise, must be prospective, and from the nature of the seeds thus sown by him, the benefits that were to be expected must be judged.  To reconcile the rude chiefs to the government and to each other;—­to infuse a spirit of humanity, by his example, into their warfare;—­to prepare the way for the employment of the expected loan, in a manner most calculated to call forth the resources of the country—­to put the fortifications of Missolonghi in such a state of repair as might, and eventually did, render it proof against the besieger;—­to prevent those infractions of neutrality, so tempting to the Greeks, which brought their government in collision with the Ionian authorities, and to restrain all such