It had been expected that, among the stores sent with Parry, there would be a supply of Congreve rockets,—­an instrument of warfare of which such wonders had been related to the Greeks as filled their imaginations with the most absurd ideas of its powers.  Their disappointment, therefore, on finding that the engineer had come unprovided with these missiles was excessive.  Another hope, too,—­that of being enabled to complete an artillery corps by the accession of those Germans who had been sent for into the Morea,—­was found almost equally fallacious; that body of men having, from the death or retirement of those who originally composed it, nearly dwindled away; and the few officers that now came to serve being, from their fantastic notions of rank and etiquette, far more troublesome than useful.  In addition to these discouraging circumstances, the five Speziot ships of war which had for some time formed the sole protection of Missolonghi were now returned to their home, and had left their places to be filled by the enemy’s squadron.

Perplexing as were all these difficulties in the way of the expedition, a still more formidable embarrassment presented itself in the turbulent and almost mutinous disposition of those Suliote troops on whom he mainly depended for success in his undertaking.  Presuming as well upon his wealth and generosity as upon their own military importance, these unruly warriors had never ceased to rise in the extravagance of their demands upon him;—­the wholly destitute and homeless state of their families at this moment affording but too well founded a pretext both for their exaction and discontent.  Nor were their leaders much more amenable to management than themselves.  “There were,” says Count Gamba, “six heads of families among them, all of whom had equal pretensions both by their birth and their exploits; and none of whom would obey any one of his comrades.”

A serious riot to which, about the middle of January, these Suliotes had given rise, and in which some lives were lost, had been a source of much irritation and anxiety to Lord Byron, as well from the ill-blood it was likely to engender between his troops and the citizens, as from the little dependence it gave him encouragement to place upon materials so unmanageable.  Notwithstanding all this, however, neither his eagerness nor his efforts for the accomplishment of this sole personal object of his ambition ever relaxed a single instant.  To whatever little glory was to be won by the attack upon Lepanto, he looked forward as his only reward for all the sacrifices he was making.  In his conversations with Count Gamba on the subject, “though he joked a good deal,” says this gentleman, “about his post of ‘Archistrategos,’ or Commander in Chief, it was plain that the romance and the peril of the undertaking were great allurements to him.”  When we combine, indeed, his determination to stand, at all hazards, by the cause, with the very faint hopes his sagacious mind would let him indulge