“P.S.  As much of this letter as you please is for the Committee, the rest may be ‘entre nous.’”

LETTER 533.  TO MR. MOORE.

“Cephalonia, December 27. 1823.

“I received a letter from you some time ago.  I have been too much employed latterly to write as I could wish, and even now must write in haste.

“I embark for Missolonghi to join Mavrocordato in four-and-twenty hours.  The state of parties (but it were a long story) has kept me here till now; but now that Mavrocordato (their Washington, or their Kosciusko) is employed again, I can act with a safe conscience. I carry money to pay the squadron, &c., and I have influence with the Suliotes, supposed sufficient to keep them in harmony with some of the dissentients;—­for there are plenty of differences, but trifling.

“It is imagined that we shall attempt either Patras or the castles on the Straits; and it seems, by most accounts, that the Greeks, at any rate, the Suliotes, who are in affinity with me of ’bread and salt,’—­expect that I should march with them, and—­be it even so!  If any thing in the way of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age of a brother warbler,—­like Garcilasso de la Vega, Kleist, Korner, Joukoffsky[1] (a Russian nightingale—­see Bowring’s Anthology), or Thersander, or,—­or somebody else—­but never mind—­I pray you to remember me in your ‘smiles and wine.’

[Footnote 1:  One of the most celebrated of the living poets of Russia, who fought at Borodino, and has commemorated that battle in a poem of much celebrity among his countrymen.]

“I have hopes that the cause will triumph; but whether it does or no, still ‘honour must be minded as strictly as milk diet,’ I trust to observe both,

“Ever,” &c.

It is hardly necessary to direct the attention of the reader to the sad, and but too true anticipation expressed in this letter—­the last but one I was ever to receive from my friend.  Before we accompany him to the closing scene of all his toils, I shall here, as briefly as possible, give a selection from the many characteristic anecdotes told of him, while at Cephalonia, where (to use the words of Colonel Stanhope, in a letter from thence to the Greek committee,) he was “beloved by Cephalonians, by English, and by Greeks;” and where, approached as he was familiarly by persons of all classes and countries, not an action, not a word is recorded of him that does not bear honourable testimony to the benevolence and soundness of his views, his ever ready but discriminating generosity, and the clear insight, at once minute and comprehensive, which he had acquired into the character and wants of the people and the cause he came to serve.  “Of all those who came to help the Greeks,” says Colonel Napier, (a person himself the most qualified to judge, as well from long local knowledge, as from the acute, straightforward