With that thanklessness which too often waits on disinterested actions, it
has been some times tauntingly remarked, and in quarters from whence a
more generous judgment might be expected, that, after all, Lord Byron
effected but little for Greece: as if much _could_ be effected by a single
individual, and in so short a time, for a cause which, fought as it has
been almost incessantly through the six years since his death, has
required nothing less than the intervention of all the great powers of
Europe to give it a chance of success, and, even so, has not yet succeeded.
That Byron himself was under no delusion, as to the importance of his own
solitary aid--that he knew, in a struggle like this, there must be the
same prodigality of means towards one great end as is observable in the
still grander operations of nature, where individuals are as nothing in
the tide of events--that such was his, at once, philosophic and melancholy
view of his own sacrifices, I have, I trust, clearly shown. But that,
during this short period of action, he did not do well and wisely all that
man could achieve in the time, and under the circumstances, is an
assertion which the noble facts here recorded fully and triumphantly
disprove. He knew that, placed as he was, his measures, to be wise, must
be prospective, and from the nature of the seeds thus sown by him, the
benefits that were to be expected must be judged. To reconcile the rude
chiefs to the government and to each other;--to infuse a spirit of
humanity, by his example, into their warfare;--to prepare the way for the
employment of the expected loan, in a manner most calculated to call forth
the resources of the country--to put the fortifications of Missolonghi in
such a state of repair as might, and eventually _did_, render it proof
against the besieger;--to prevent those infractions of neutrality, so
tempting to the Greeks, which brought their government in collision with
the Ionian authorities, and to restrain all such license of the press as
might indispose the courts of Europe to their cause:--such were the
important objects which he had proposed to himself to accomplish, and
towards which, in this brief interval, and in the midst of such
dissensions and hindrances, he had already made considerable and most
promising progress. But it would be unjust to close even here the bright
catalogue of his services. It is, after all, _not_ with the span of mortal
life that the good achieved by a name immortal ends. The charm acts into
the future--it is an auxiliary through all time; and the inspiring example
of Byron, as a martyr of liberty, is for ever freshly embalmed in his
glory as a poet.