into Phocis, and had been obliged to retreat with considerable loss; no hope remained therefore of any co-operation by the way of the Isthmus.

As the distresses of the besieged increased, so also did the disagreements among their several leaders. Attempts were made to enter into a treaty of capitulation, but the absence of Ypsilanti, and of the Europeans who accompanied him, having put an end to the little resemblance to a regular army, which had before existed, it was impossible to arrange any terms in which the besieged could have the smallest confidence. From this time there seems to have been an end to all discipline and concert of measures on both sides. The principal men of the city thought only of saving themselves and families, and the Greek chiefs of turning the circumstances to their personal advantage. The Albanians in the service of Khurshid made a separate agreement for their unmolested return to Albania. Several rich Turks and Jews purchased the promise of a safe conduct from Kolokotróni and Mavromikháli; but these, though they received the price of their engagements, were never able to execute them. On the 5th of October, some of their followers, having discovered what was passing, and being

resolved not to be defrauded of their expected plunder by the selfish avidity of their leaders, assaulted the walls on the northern side, and were speedily followed into the city by all the besieging forces.

For two days the town was given up to those horrors formerly common under such circumstances, but which are now happily almost banished from civilized warfare. That Tripolitza should have been saved from them in the position as well previous as actual of the contending parties, it would have been unreasonable to expect. Suffice it to say, that every kind of excess which a wanton

indulgence in cruelty and a thirst of plunder could suggest, was inflicted on the Turkish and Jewish inhabitants of this unhappy place; and that, when victims failed within the walls, the Greeks proceeded to put to death a large body of defenceless inhabitants, who, having been allowed to remove from the town in consequence of the famine, still remained in the vicinity. On the third day after the assault, the Albanians, who had quitted the place in safety, which they owed less to the good faith of the enemy than to the protection of their arms, departed towards Patræ; and on the following day the citadel capitulated to Kolokotróni.

Of the hostages who had been received from different parts of the Peninsula in the spring, twothirds had perished by sickness, ill usage, or actual violence. Although this circumstance may have increased the sufferings of the captured city, it cannot be supposed to have had much influence upon its fate; this is too well accounted for by the character of its assailants, a great part of whom had been robbers or pirates, and whose savage disposition was neither repressed by any treaty with the besieged, or by the influence of any civilized individuals of their own nation or of any other. The Greek chieftains had sufficient power only to save the harem of the Pasha, together with the Bey of Corinth, and a few others of the enemy, whose influence it was thought might be useful in the sequel.

Both in a military and political point of view, the capture of Tripolitza was a most important event for the Greeks. It gave them all the interior of the Peninsula, and confined the Osmanlys to five maritime fortresses. It frustrated the hopes of the Turkish admiral, furnished arms for several thousand men, and inspired great confidence in the ultimate success of the insurrection at a critical moment. Although it added very little to a better

administration of affairs, and not a dollar to the national treasury, it enabled the chieftains to keep their forces united by regular pay, and hence gave them greater authority in promoting any designs of utility, as well as greater power for the future in repressing the cruelty and ill faith which had disgraced the cause at Navarin, as well as at Tripolitza, and which rendered the acquisition of the other fortresses in the Moréa more difficult, by obliging the Turkish garrisons to hold out to the utmost extremity.

Not that we suppose it would have been possible, by any degree of caution and humanity on the part of the leaders of the insurrection in the Peloponnesus, to have prevented by their example the horrid cruelties which were perpetrated in other parts of the empire, wherever the unarmed Greeks were left at the mercy of a large Turkish population, or wherever the lower orders of Greeks, in the first intoxication of freedom, and amenable to no tribunal of their own nation, could find an opportunity of indulging the vindictive feelings which for so many ages had been rankling in the bosoms of their racc. These cruelties were the inevitable consequence of the previous position of

the two people: but the Greeks have been immensely the losers in the sad account of misery and slaughter; for the insurgents, having been reduced to the desperate necessity of pursuing the main object of their liberation without any regard to the fatal effects which it might have on their brethren more exposed than themselves to Turkish vengeance, the result has been, that while all the numerous Greek families, inhabiting the maritime districts, or the great towns of the European and Anatolian divisions of the empire, have been and still are entirely at the mercy of their oppressors; it has been only in some parts of Northern Greece and the Moréa, or in a few of the islands, or in the incursions of the islanders on the coast of Asia, or on being intercepted at sea by the Greek ships on their return from the Levant in the first year of the war, that the Turks have been exposed to cruel treatment from the Greeks. The Turks of.. Greece were few in number; they were armed, they resided chiefly in fortified places, or they had it in their power to retire into the fortresses; so that, in fact, the Greeks have had little opportunity except at Tripolitza, of retaliating upon the defenceless families of the Turks for the fate