"We will do our best--and I pray you to stir your English hearts at home to more _general_ exertion; for my part, I will stick by the cause while a plank remains which can be _honourably_ clung to. If I quit it, it will be by the Greeks' conduct, and not the Holy Allies or holier Mussulmans--but let us hope better things.
"P.S. I am happy to say that Colonel Leicester Stanhope and myself are acting in perfect harmony together--he is likely to be of great service both to the cause and to the Committee, and is publicly as well as personally a very valuable acquisition to our party on every account. He came up (as they all do who have not been in the country before) with some high-flown notions of the sixth form at Harrow or Eton, &c.; but Col. Napier and I set him to rights on those points, which is absolutely necessary to prevent disgust, or perhaps return; but now we can set our shoulders _soberly_ to the _wheel_, without quarrelling with the mud which may clog it occasionally.
"I can assure you that Col. Napier and myself are as decided for the cause as any German student of them all; but like men who have seen the country and human life, there and elsewhere, we must be permitted to view it in its truth, with its defects as well as beauties,--more especially as success will remove the former _gradually_. N. B.
"P.S. As much of this letter as you please is for the Committee, the rest may be 'entre nous.'"
"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.'
