received a commission from the
Greek government, recruited a band of Suliotes, and set forth gallantly to
do or die in the cause of Grecian freedom: he died, but not in battle. He
caught a fever of a virulent type, from his exposure, and after very few
days expired, on the 19th of April, 1824, amid the mourning of the nation.
Of this event, Macaulay--no mean or uncertain critic--could say, in his
epigrammatical style: "Two men have died within our recollection, who, at
a time of life at which few people have completed their education, had
raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory. One
of them died at Longwood; the other at Missolonghi."

ESTIMATE OF HIS POETRY.--In giving a brief estimate of his character and
of his works, we may begin by saying that he represents, in clear
lineaments, the nobleman, the traveller, the poet, and the debauchee, of
the beginning of the nineteenth century. In all his works he unconsciously
depicts himself. He is in turn Childe Harold, Lara, the Corsair, and Don
Juan. He affected to despise the world's opinion so completely that he has
made himself appear worse than he really was--more profane, more
intemperate, more licentious. It is equally true that this tendency, added
to the fact that he was a handsome peer, had much to do with the immediate
popularity of his poems. There was also a paradoxical vanity, which does
not seem easily reconcilable with his misanthropy, that thus led him to
reproduce himself in a new dress in his dramas and tales. He paraded
himself as if, after all, he did value the world's opinion.

That he was one of the new romantic poets, with, however, a considerable
tincture of the transition school, may be readily discerned in his works:
his earlier poems are full of the conceits of the artificial age. His
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ reminds one of the _MacFlecknoe_ of
Dryden and _The Dunciad_ of Pope, without being as good as either. When
he began that original and splendid portrait of himself, and transcript
of his travels, _Childe Harold_, he imitated Spenser in form and in
archaism. But he was possessed by the muse: the man wrote as the spirit
within dictated, as the Pythian priestess is fabled to have uttered her
oracles. _Childe Harold_ is a stream of intuitive, irrepressible poetry;
not art, but overflowing nature: the sentiments good and bad came welling
forth from his heart. His descriptive powers are great but peculiar.