Note 6, p. [100].—A short excursus on the manner of selecting juries. The ingenious rhetorical device which follows in this selection, after the break, should be noted. The parallelism between Ireland and Portugal is carried as far as it could well go: and argument by persuasion has seldom been more effectively attempted.

Note 7, p. [106].—A Portuguese coin, of gold, and valued at eight dollars. So called from the medallion on it of King John.

Note 8, p. [116].—The note of O’Connell’s son and editor, so characteristic, is worth preserving: “And slaves, hypocrites, and bigots they proved themselves, by finding a verdict for the Crown.”

Note 9, p. [133].—In the short passage here omitted Lord Palmerston deprecates certain aspersions laid by a member of the Opposition upon the Queen’s Advocate, the legal adviser of the Foreign Office.

Note 10, p. [144].—References respectively to the grievances of Mr. Finlay—not born in Scotland, as the speaker asserts, but of Scotch descent—and of Don Pacifico, a Jew from Gibraltar, whose cases are soon to be discussed at length.

Note 11, p. [151].—George Finlay has titles to fame other than his connection with the rather sordid cause célèbre of Don Pacifico. As remarked above, he was not born in Scotland, but at Faversham, Kent, Dec. 21, 1799; and passed the greater part of his long life far from the north. While pursuing the study of Roman Jurisprudence at Göttingen, about 1821, he met a Greek student from whose conversation he was led to set out for Greece, like many another young Englishman of the epoch, prepared to take part in the war for independence then bursting forth. Arrived in Greece, also like many other English Phil-Hellenes he had the usual encounter with Lord Byron (in his case at Cephalonia), who communicated to him the well-known failure of his illusions concerning the Greek character. More than the ordinary run of Phil-Hellenes Finlay seems to have impressed himself upon the poet; and they spent much time together at Athens and Mesolonghi. Finlay was soon in the thick of the insurrection, and accompanied the chieftain Odysseus on an expedition into the Morea, during which he saw much to confirm Lord Byron’s pessimistic views. Nevertheless, at the close of the war, his practical sympathy with Greece manifested itself in the purchase of an estate in Attica, from which he hoped to be of use to the country by the extension of economic and civil improvements. This hope he soon considered to be useless: but his money was locked up in his land purchases, and, as he himself said, there was nothing else to do but to study. With the exception of a few absences, the remainder of his life was spent in Greece, where he accomplished no small service to the country of his residence, and one of great importance to the world. The former lay in his severe, but justifiable, criticisms, in the form of pamphlets or newspaper correspondence, of palpable errors in Greek politics and administration. These censures, often translated into the Greek papers, after a time really bore fruit, and, strangely enough, did not arouse the touchy Greek character to resentment against the critic. His service to the world was the composition of a monumental history of Late, Byzantine, and Modern Greece, definitively published, in 1877, by the Clarendon Press. The work covers the least known and most confusing period of Greek history, known previously in English almost solely by the picturesque, but rather un-oriented pages of Gibbon. Of it Dr. Richard Garnett, in the “National Dictionary of Biography,” says: “Finlay is a great historian of the type of Polybius, Procopius, and Machiavelli, a man of affairs, who has qualified himself for treating of public transactions by sharing in them, a soldier, a statesman, and an economist.” In a word, the book is much more minute than Gibbon; and, due doubtless to Finlay’s thorough understanding of the Greek race, it is luminous on matters of social description, where Gibbon preserves a large silence. Compared with the other Phil-Hellenes Finlay was less the military adventurer, like Trelawney and Sir Richard Church, than the practical friend of Greece, like the American Dr. Howe. The camps of Europe could and did supply to the Greek cause an abundance, not always disinterested, of the former class; but it is probable that the wrecked and distracted country, when it began the task of civilizing itself, owed far more to men of Finlay’s stamp. He died at Athens, Jan. 26, 1875.

Note 12, p. [160].—“Against the hundred.” The reference is to a peculiarity of the English common law, by which a district, originally containing a literal hundred of families, was entitled a “Hundred.” For offences committed within these precincts the inhabitants, or “Hundredors,” as they were called, were held civilly responsible. The division was probably of Germanic origin, having been established among the Franks by Clotaire, among the English by King Alfred.

Note 13, p. [165].—Lazzaroni, originally the name of the beggars and idlers who sought refuge at the Hospital of S. Lazarus in Naples, came to be the generic term applied to that class of irresponsible and half-criminal riffraff in Italy who in France are called the canaille.

Note 14, p. [184].—The little Ionian republic, seven-isled, or Heptanēsos, was formally taken under the protection of England in 1815. This protectorate endured until the accession (1863) of George, the present King of the Hellenes, when, at the request of the islanders, the republic was incorporated with Hellas proper, to which ethnically and geographically it belonged. During the period of the protectorate England was represented by a series of Lord High Commissioners, of whom the first, Sir Thomas Maitland, familiarly known in the Levant as “King Tom,” was in many respects a character. His palace, still a prominent feature of the town of Corfu, is of almost baronial splendor; to the south of the Esplanade the grateful Ionians erected in 1816 a small circular temple in his honor. Corfu, the island, is probably the most famous of the group, having been, as the ancient Kérkura, a Corinthian colony, one of the inciting causes of the Peloponnesian War. Antiquity also somewhat fancifully identified it with the Homeric Scheria, the abode of Alkinoos and the matchless Nausikaa, naming its neighbor Ithaka—that other Odyssean isle. It is to be said that the latter identification is less fanciful than the former.

Note 15, p. [188].—This Baronet was Sir James Robert George Graham (1792–1861), long, although with some fluctuation, a prominent member of the Whig party. Although he held some high offices during the first half of the century, his fame was but evanescent. He was never a Whig at heart, it would seem. Haughty in manner and aristocrat to the bone, his high talents were neutralized by his personal unpopularity. Like Robert Lowe, but in a greater degree, he failed of the success which he might reasonably have expected. A prevalent artificiality of mind was also a bar to his ambitions.