The enthusiastic and, in many respects, well founded confidence with which Colonel Stanhope appealed to the authority of Mr. Bentham on most of the points at issue between himself and Lord Byron, was, from that natural antipathy which seems to exist between political economists and poets, but little sympathised in by the latter;—­such appeals being always met by him with those sallies of ridicule, which he found the best-humoured vent for his impatience under argument, and to which, notwithstanding the venerable name and services of Mr. Bentham himself, the quackery of much that is promulgated by his followers presented, it must be owned, ample scope.  Romantic, indeed, as was Lord Byron’s sacrifice of himself to the cause of Greece, there was in the views he took of the means of serving her not a tinge of the unsubstantial or speculative.  The grand practical task of freeing her from her tyrants was his first and main object.  He knew that slavery was the great bar to knowledge, and must be broken through before her light could come; that the work of the sword must therefore precede that of the pen, and camps be the first schools of freedom.

With such sound and manly views of the true exigencies of the crisis, it is not wonderful that he should view with impatience, and something, perhaps, of contempt, all that premature apparatus of printing-presses, pedagogues, &c. with which the Philhellenes of the London Committee were, in their rage for “utilitarianism,” encumbering him.  Nor were some of the correspondents of this body much more solid in their speculations than themselves; one intelligent gentleman having suggested, as a means of conferring signal advantages on the cause, an alteration of the Greek alphabet.

Though feeling, as strongly, perhaps, as Lord Byron, the importance of the great object of their mission,—­that of rousing and, what was far more difficult, combining against the common foe the energies of the country,—­Colonel Stanhope was also one of those who thought that the lights of their great master, Bentham, and the operations of a press unrestrictedly free, were no less essential instruments towards the advancement of the struggle; and in this opinion, as we have seen, the poet and man of literature differed from the soldier.  But it was such a difference as, between men of frank and fair minds, may arise without either reproach to themselves, or danger to their cause,—­a strife of opinion which; though maintained with heat, may be remembered without bitterness, and which, in the present instance, neither prevented Byron, at the close of one of their warmest altercations, from exclaiming generously to his opponent, “Give me that honest right hand,” nor withheld the other from pouring forth, at the grave of his colleague, a strain of eulogy[1] not the less cordial for being discriminatingly shaded with censure, nor less honourable to the illustrious dead for being the tribute of one who had once manfully differed with him.