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put him under arrest, according to the order. This, it appears, did not please his German confederation: but I stuck by my text; and have given them plainly to understand, that those who do not choose to be amenable to the laws of the country and service, may retire; but that in all that I have to do, I will see them obeyed by foreigner or native. "I wish something was heard of the arrival of part of the loan, for there is a plentiful dearth of every thing at present."

LETTER DLX.

TO MR. BARFF.

"April 6th.

"Since I wrote, we have had some tumult here with the citizens and Cariascachi's people, and all are under arms, our boys and all. They nearly fired on me and fifty of my lads,* by mistake, as we were taking our usual excursion into the country. To-day matters are settled or subsiding; but about an hour ago, the father-in-law of the landlord of the house where I am lodged (one of the Primates the said landlord is) was arrested for high-treason.

"They are in conclave still with Mavrocordato; and we have a number of new faces from the hills, come to assist, they say. Gunboats and batteries all ready, &c.

into Greece; especially as such a mode of punishment would disgust rather than reform. We hit upon an expedient which favoured our military discipline but it required not only all Lord Byron's eloquence, but his authority, to prevail upon our Germans to accede to it. The culprit had his uniform stripped off his back, in presence of his comrades, and was afterward marched through the town with a label on his back, describing both in Greek and Italian the nature of his offence; after which he was given up to the regular police. This example of severity, tempered by a humane spirit, produced the best effect upon our soldiers, as well as upon the citizens of the town. But it was very near causing a most disagreeable circumstance; for, in the course of the evening, some very high words passed on the subject between three Englishmen, two of them officers of our brigade, in consequence of which cards were exchanged, and two duels were to have been fought the next morning. Lord Byron did not hear of this till late at night: but he immediately ordered me to arrest both parties, which I accordingly did; and, after some difficulty, prevailed on them to shake hands."-COUNT GAMBA'S Narrative.

* A corps of fifty Suliotes which he had, almost ever since his arrival at Missolonghi, kept about him as a body-guard. A large outer room of his house was appropriated to these troops; and their carbines were suspended along the walls. "In this room," says Mr. Parry, "and among these rude soldiers, Lord Byron was accustomed to walk a great deal, particularly in wet weather, accompanied with his favourite dog, Lion."

When he rode out, these fifty Suliotes attended him on foot; and though they carried their carbines, "they were always," says the same authority, "able to keep up with their horses at full speed. The captain, and a certain number, preceded his lordship, who rode accompanied on one side by Count Gamba, and on the other by the Greek interpreter. Behind him, also on horseback, came two of his servants, generally his black groom, and Tita, -both dressed like the chasseurs usually seen behind the carriages of ambassadors, and another division of his guard closed the cavalcade."-PARRY'S Last Days of Lord Byron.

"The row has had one good effect-it has put them on the alert. What is to become of the father-in-law, I do not know; nor what he has done, exactly;* but

"T is a very fine thing to be father-in-law

To a very magnificent three-tail'd bashaw,'

as the man in Bluebeard says and sings. I wrote to you upon matters at length, some days ago; the letter, or letters, you will receive with this. We are desirous to hear more of the loan; and it is some time since I have had any letters (at least of an interesting description) from England, excepting one of 4th February, from Bowring (of no great importance). My latest dates are of 9bre, or of the 6th 10bre, four months exactly. I hope you get on well in the islands: here most of us are, or have been, more or less indisposed, natives as well as foreigners."

LETTER DLXI.

TO MR. BARFF.

"April 7th.

"The Greeks here of the Government have been boring me for more money. As I have the brigade to maintain, and the campaign is apparently now to open, and as I have already spent 30,000 dollars in three months upon them in one way or another, and more especially as their public loan has succeeded, so that they ought not to draw from individuals at that rate, I have given them a refusal, and—as they would not take that,—another refusal in terms of considerable sincerity.

"They wish now to try in the islands for a few thousand dollars on the ensuing loan. If you can serve them, perhaps you will (in the way of information, at any rate), and I will see that you have fair play, but still I do not advise you, except to act as you please. Almost every thing depends upon the arrival, and the speedy arrival, of a portion of the loan to keep peace among themselves. If they can but have sense to do this, I think that they will be a match and better for any force that can be brought against them for the present. We are all doing as well as we can."

It will be perceived from these letters, that besides the great and general interests of the cause, which were in themselves sufficient to absorb all his thoughts, he was also met, on every side, in the details of his duty, by every possible variety of obstruction and distraction that

*This man had, it seems, on his way from Ioannina, passed by Anatolico, and held several conferences with Cariascachi. He had long been suspected of being a spy; and the letters found upon him confirmed the suspicion.

+ In consequence of the mutinous proceedings of Cariascachi's people, most of the neighbouring Chieftains hastened to the assistance of the Government, and had already with this view marched to Anatolico near 2000 men, But, however opportune the arrival of such a force, they were a cause of fresh embarrassment, as there was a total want of provisions for their daily maintenance. It was in this emergency that the Governor, Primates, and Chieftains had recourse, as here stated, to their usual source of supply.

rapacity, turbulence, and treachery could throw in his way. Such vexations, too, as would have been trying to the most robust health, here fell upon a frame already marked out for death; nor can we help feeling, while we contemplate this last scene of his life, that, much as there is in it to admire, to wonder at, and glory in, there is also much that awakens sad and most distressful thoughts. In a situation more than any other calling for sympathy and care, we see him cast among strangers and mercenaries, without either nurse or friend;-the selfcollectedness of woman being, as we shall find, wanting for the former office, and the youth and inexperience of Count Gamba unfitting him wholly for the other. The very firmness with which a position so lone and disheartening was sustained, serves, by interesting us more deeply in the man, to increase our sympathy, till we, almost forget admiration in pity, and half regret that he should have been great at such a cost.

The only circumstances that had for some time occurred to give him pleasure were, as regarded public affairs, the news of the successful progress of the loan, and, in his personal relations, some favourable intelligence which he had received, after a long interruption of communication, respecting his sister and daughter. The former, he learned, had been seriously indisposed at the very time of his own fit, but had now entirely recovered. While delighted at this news, he could not help, at the same time, remarking, with his usual tendency to such superstitious feelings, how strange and striking was the coincidence.

To those who have, from his childhood, traced him through these pages, it must be manifest, I think, that Lord Byron was not formed to be long-lived. Whether from any hereditary defect in his organization, as he himself, from the circumstance of both his parents having died young, concluded, or from those violent means he so early took to counteract the natural tendency of his habit, and reduce himself to thinness, he was, almost every year, as we have seen, subject to attacks of indisposition, by more than one of which his life was seriously endangered. The capricious course which he at all times pursued respecting diet,-his long fastings, his expedients for the aliayment of hunger, his occasional excesses in the most unwholesome food, and, during the latter part of his residence in Italy, his indulgence in the use of spirituous beverages,--all this could not be otherwise than hurtful and undermining to his health; while his constant recourse to medicine-daily, as it appears, and in large quantities-both evinced and, no doubt, increased the derangement of his digestion. When to all this we add the wasteful wear of spirits and strength from the slow corrosion of sensibility, the warfare of the passions, and the workings of a mind that allowed itself no sabbath, it is not to be wondered at that the vital principle in him should so soon have burnt out, or that, at the age of thirty-three, he should have had-as he himself drearily expresses it-"an old feel." To feed the flame, the all-absorbing flame, of his genius, the whole powers of his nature, physical as well as moral, were sacrificed;-to present that grand and costly conflagration to the world's eyes, in which,

"Glittering, like a palace set on fire,

His glory, while it shone, but ruined him!"*

* Beaumont and Fletcher.

It was on the very day when, as I have mentioned, the intelligence of his sister's recovery reached him, that, having been for the last three or four days prevented from taking exercise by the rains, he resolved, though the weather still looked threatening, to venture out on horseback. Three miles! om Missolonghi, Count Gamba and himself were overtaken by a heavy shower, and returned to the town walls wet through and in a state of violent perspiration. It had been their usual practice to dismount at the walls and return to their house in a boat, but, on this day, Count Gamba, representing to Lord Byron how dangerous it would be, warm as he then was, to sit exposed so long to the rain in a boat, entreated of him to go back the whole way on horseback. To this, however, Lord Byron would not consent; but said, laughingly, "I should make a pretty soldier, indeed, if I were to care for such a trifle." They accordingly dismounted and got into the boat as usual.

About two hours after his return home he was seized with a shuddering, and complained of a fever and rheumatic pains. "At eight that evening," says Count Gamba, "I entered his room. He was lying on a sofa restless and melancholy. He said to me, 'I suffer a great deal of pain. I do not care for death, but these agonies I cannot bear.""

On his

The following day he rose at his accustomed hour,-transacted business, and was even able to take his ride in the olive woods, accompanied, as usual, by his long train of Suliotes. He complained, however, of perpetual shudderings, and had no appetite. return home, he remarked to Fletcher that his saddle, he thought, had not been perfectly dried since yesterday's wetting, and that he felt himself the worse for it. This was the last time he ever crossed the threshold alive. In the evening Mr. Finlay and Mr. Millingen called upon him. "He was at first," says the latter gentleman, “gayer than usual; but on a sudden became pensive."

On the evening of the 11th his fever, which was pronounced to be rheumatic, increased; and on the 12th he kept his bed all day, complaining that he could not sleep, and taking no nourishment whatever. The two following days, though the fever had apparently diminished, he became still more weak, and suffered much from pains in the head, It was not till the 14th that his physician, Doctor Bruno, finding the sudorifies which he had hitherto employed to be unavailing, began to urge upon his patient the necessity of being bled. Of this, however, Lord Byron would not hear. He had evidently but little reliance on his medical attendant, and from the specimens this young man has since given of his intellect to the world, it is, indeed, lamentable,-supposing skill to have been, at this moment, of any avail,—that a life so precious should have been intrusted to such ordinary hands. "It was on this day, I think," says Count Gamba, "that, as I was sitting near him on his sofa, he said to me, 'I was afraid I was losing my mentory, and, in order to try, I attempted to repeat some Latin verses with the English translation, which I have not endeavoured to recollect since I was at school. I remembered them all except the last word of one of the hexameters.""

To the faithful Fletcher, the idea of his master's life being in danger seems to have occurred some days before it struck either Count Gamba or the physician. So little, according to his friend's narrative, had such a suspicion crossed Lord Byron's own mind, that he even expressed himself "rather glad of his fever, as it might cure him of his

tendency to epilepsy." To Fletcher, however, it appears, he had professed, more than once, strong doubts as to the nature of his complaint being so slight as the physician seemed to suppose it, and on his servant renewing his entreaties that he would send for Doctor Thomas to Zante, made no further opposition; though still, out of consideration for those gentlemen, he referred him on the subject to Doctor Bruno and Mr. Millingen. Whatever might have been the advantage or satisfaction of this step, it was now rendered wholly impossible by the weather, such a hurricane blowing into the port that not a ship could get out. The rain, too, descended in torrents, and between the floods on the land-side and the sirocco from the sea, Missolonghi was, for the moment, a pestilential prison.

It was at this juncture that Mr. Millingen was, for the first time, according to his own account, invited to attend Lord Byron in his medical capacity,—his visit on the 10th being so little, as he states, professional, that he did not even, on that occasion, feel his lordship's pulse. The great object for which he was now called in, and rather, it would seem, by Fletcher than Doctor Bruno, was for the purpose of joining his representations and remonstrances to theirs, and prevailing upon the patient to suffer himself to be bled,-an operation now become absolutely necessary from the increase of the fever, and which Doctor Bruno had, for the last two days, urged in vain.

Holding gentleness to be, with a disposition like that of Byron, the most effectual means of success, Mr. Millingen tried, as he himself tells us, all that reasoning and persuasion could suggest towards attaining his object. But his efforts were fruitless :-Lord Byron, who had now become morbidly irritable, replied angrily, but still with all his accus. tomed acuteness and spirit, to the physician's observations. Of all his prejudices, he declared, the strongest was that against bleeding. His mother had on her deathbed obtained from him a promise never to consent to being bled; and whatever argument might be produced, his aversion, he said, was stronger than reasor. "Besides, is it not," he asked, "asserted by Doctor Reid, in his Essays, that less slaughter is effected by the lance than the lancet-that minute instrument of mighty mischief!" On Mr. Millengen observing that this remark related to the treatment of nervous, but not of inflammatory complaints, he rejoined, in an angry tone, "Who is nervous, if I am not? And do not those other words of his, too, apply to my case, where he says that drawing blood from a nervous patient is like loosening the chords of a musical instrument, whose tones already fail for want of sufficient tension? Even before this illness, you yourself know how weak and irritable I had become ;-and bleeding, by increasing this state, will inevitably kill me. Do with me whatever else you like, but bleed me you shall not. I have had several inflammatory fevers in my life, and at an age when more robust and plethoric; yet I got through them with out bleeding. This time, also, will I take my chance."*

After much reasoning and repeated entreaties, Mr. Millingen at length succeeded in obtaining from him a promise, that should he feel his fever increase at night, he would allow Doctor Bruno to bleed him. During this day he had transacted business and received several letters; particularly one that much pleased him from the Turkish

It was during the same, or some similar conversation, that Dr. Bruno also reports him to have said, "If my hour is come, I shall die, whether I lose my blood or keep it."

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