On Friday, the thirteenth of June, 1823, Byron sailed from London in his crazy round-bottomed tub, the "Hercules." "They all say I can be of use to Greece," he wrote to Trelawney, "I do not know how--nor do they; but, at all events, let us go." Ypsilanti lay festering in Metternich's Austrian oubliette, but to Byron's sanguine hope the prospect was bright. George Gordon, Lord Byron, and the Hetairia Philike, that secret sodality of Hellenic patriots, should make Greece free.

The "Hercules" furled sail at Samos. The emissaries who were to have met Lord Byron were gone, one fled, the other captive. Ibrahim Pasha swept over Greece with fire and sword and torture, sleek with the returns which captives brought in the Egyptian slave-market. The English Lord fretted in stagnation.

"Eccolo, e matto, poveretto," the poor fellow is gone mad, exclaimed the Abbot at the monastery at Samos, while Byron raged with fever, allowing no one in his cell, breaking up the last shred of furnishing, beating Bruno, his unfledged physician, over the head. Bruno tore his hair, gnashed his teeth, wept because he had no power to use his poor skill on his master; the monks trembled and prayed. News of action came. Byron recovered overnight, set forth with miraculous energy; "I believed myself on a fool's errand from the first," he wrote, but he endured everything, the lies of the Greeks, the embezzlement of his lieutenants, physical sufferings. He sold his English Estates. Not for Argive cowards, but for Liberty, he fought.

"Seek out, less often sought than found

A soldier's grave, for thee the best;

There look around and choose thy ground,

And take thy rest,"

They were his last lines. No Moslem scimitar, but the blundering of his incompetent doctors bled the life-blood from him. On Easter Monday, 1824 he murmered "I must sleep now," and was gone. Two years later politicians, adventurers, and secretaries made Greece free. They desire to destroy Metternich's system.

TODAY

12 O'Clock

"The Greek Revolution," Professor Langer, Harvard 6.