near Chios and Mytilini, returned to the Egyptian armament in the gulf of Cos, and in the month of November his ships sustained considerable damage from the enemy on the northern coast of Candia.

If neither the Ottoman army in Thessaly can succour the fortresses at the entrance of the gulf of Corinth by land nor their navy by sea, as appears highly probable, those garrisons must be left to their own resources. We learn that Patræ is now invested with a large body of land forces, and that such a number of Greek vessels is stationed at the entrance of the gulf as has justified the government of the Ionian islands in issuing a proclamation enjoining all vessels bearing the insular flag to respect the blockade of the gulf. This proclamation was dated from Corfú, on the 17th November.

At no period of the contest have the prospects of the insurgents received such a rapid improvement as in the last six months. In the beginning of June, the persons forming the civil government were engaged in open hostility with their own military chieftains, who had shut them out from their capital and principal fortress of Nauplia. They had to prepare for the campaign with exhausted means; they had not yet received any

part of the loan which had been raised in London by their agents four months before; and they were in daily expectation of an attack from an armament composed of the combined forces of all the Musulman powers of the Mediterranean, the most formidable that had yet been collected against them.

It was under these desperate circumstances, that the executive, alarmed at their danger, and indignant at seeing among the transports hired at Constantinople and Alexandria, a great number of European flags, issued on the 8th June from the Mills of Nauplia, (the ancient Lerne,) an edict, authorising their cruizers to attack, burn, and sink, with their ships' companies, all the European vessels which they should find so employed.

We know by the experience of our own history, how difficult a question of international law is that of the extent of a belligerent's right to search, detain, or capture a neutral vessel; and the question is certainly not simplified by the circumstances of the present contest. No wonder then that men so unread and unpractised as the persons administering the government of Greece should have fallen into an error on this occasion, The tenor and tendency of the Greek orders, however,

had they been ever so right in principle, were too piratical to pass unnoticed. It was necessary to obviate the danger to which Maltese or other vessels under the British flag or protection might be exposed from the cruelty or thirst of plunder of any uncommissioned ruffian, who might take advantage of the Greek decree.

It seems to have been very reluctantly that the British government proceeded to adopt strong measures on this occasion, for it was not until the 6th of September, three months after the date of the Greek manifesto, that a proclamation was issued at Corfú, notifying that, in consequence of the refusal of the Greek government to annul the obnoxious decree, our admiral in the Mediterranean had been directed to seize and detain all armed vessels acknowledging the authority of the provisional government of Greece.

The Greek edict was rescinded by a new proclamation from Nauplia, according to which the Greek seamen were instructed that merchant ships under European flags, carrying stores and provisions without troops, had the privileges of neutrality, and were to be subject only to the usages existing under the same circumstances among European powers: which usages, it is to

be supposed, cannot protect them from the fortune of war, from capture, and even destruction, in case of their being found in company with and aiding a military operation of the enemy.

This new decree of the Greek government was speedily followed by another, requiring all Greek privateers to furnish themselves with commissions from the government; and thus amicably terminated the most serious of those inevitable collisions that has yet occurred between the delegated authorities of the Greek insurrection and the government of the western islands of Greece. The event will have been a lesson doubly useful to the Greeks, should it lead to the conviction that they are fortunate in having a neighbour who, from political necessity, is a vigilant observer of their conduct; who is qualified, by superior knowledge and experience, to give them the advice best calculated to keep them in the road of their true interests; and whose inclinations prompt him to bestow upon them all the assistance, compatible with the neutrality which is essential to the maintenance of the general peace of Europe.

LONDON, January, 1825.

THE close of 1824 arrived without the accomplishment of any of the great designs announced by the Porte in the beginning of that year. Of the forces enumerated in the plan of campaign which has been mentioned, the Egyptians had proceeded no farther than Crete, while the armies ordered for Northern Greece had either not been assembled at all or had dwindled into small bodies which had performed nothing of importance. By the experience of the three preceding summers there remained no hope to the Porte of making an impression upon the Moréa from the northward, without the simultaneous debarkation of a large and well appointed force on some part of the Peloponnesian coast; but the finances as well as the military ardour of the provinces of Europe and Asia were too much exhausted to render that easy in 1825 which had so thoroughly failed in 1822. As long, however, as any of the fortresses of the Moréa remained in possession of the Turks there was some prospect of success, and as the Pasha of Egypt entered cordially into the war, prompted apparently by a Musulman feeling, by the importance to him at all times of a good