Note 11 — LORD PALMERSTON. ON THE CASE OF DON PACIFICO: HOUSE OF COMMONS, JUNE 25, 1850.

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.