cy have no end."

The splendid exploit with the fireships in Basque Roads followed in
1809, and with that Lord Cochrane's services to England as a seaman were
brought to a conclusion. Official persecution kept him in idleness
during the remaining period of war with France, and he was in the end
driven to seek relief from oppression at home, and exercise for his
talents, by devoting himself to the cause of freedom in Chili, Peru,
Brazil, and Greece. His unparalleled successes on both sides of the
South American continent, and the circumstances of his partial failure
in Greece, have been sufficiently detailed in previous chapters.

All through that time of virtual expatriation, his dearest hope had been
that England would, as far as possible, retrieve the cruel wrong that
had been done to him. Full redress was impossible. The heavy cloud that
had been cast over so many years of his most energetic manhood could not
be removed by any tardy act of justice; but that tardy justice could at
any rate be done to him, and for this he strove with unabated zeal.

To this end he was partly occupied during his temporary absence from
Greece in 1828. On the 4th of June he addressed a memorial to the Duke
of Clarence, then Lord High Admiral, who just two years afterwards was
to become King of England. This memorial, eloquent in its simplicity and
earnestness, the prelude to many others that were to be presented in
later years, claims to be here quoted in full. "To his Royal Highness
the Lord High Admiral," it ran, "the memorial of Lord Cochrane humbly
showeth;--That for fourteen years your memorialist has suffered, among
many injuries and privations, the loss of his situation and rank as
post-captain in his Majesty's navy, in consequence of a verdict
pronouncing your memorialist guilty of an offence of which he was
entirely and absolutely innocent;--That during the whole course of your
memorialist's life, up to the day on which he was charged with the crime
of conspiring with others to raise false reports for the purpose of
fraudulently effecting a rise in the price of the public funds, the
character and conduct of your memorialist were without reproach; and,
numerous as have been the transactions in which your memorialist has
subsequently engaged, he has, amid them all, uniformly preserved, though
not an unassailed, yet an unshaken and unsullied character;--That your
memorialist has never ceased, and never can cease to assert his absol