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Richards: Samuel Gridlcy Hoive 641 dismisses all too briefly to take up the Greek letters and journals which, pieced out here and there from Howe's Sketch of the Greek Revolution, yield a work almost purely autobiographical. The journals are the chief sources ; and there are four of them, running severally from April to December, 1825; November, 1826, to February 16, 1827; July 5 to November 13, 1827; and November 12, 1828, to June, 1829. This leaves three serious gaps: December, 1825, to November, 1826 (Missolonghi) ; February to July, 1827 (Fall of Athens) ; and June, 1829, to June, 1830, when he left Greece a free country. Their cause was at a low ebb when Howe joined the Greeks in the winter of 1824-1825; and his pictures of guerrilla warfare in the Morea, where he first saw service, are extremely realistic. Without discipline or commissariat, in a country exhausted by four years of war, the Greek guerrillero lived a hard life which the young surgeon cheerfully shared. Subsisting often on sorrel and snails or on roasted wasps and rarely knowing the luxury of such lodgings as he at times enjoyed in the an- cient galleries of Tiryns, he proved as hardy as the best; and if worst come to worst, he even contemplates forming a band of a dozen rough- riding Philhellenes to harass the Turk. But his best service was not in dealing but in binding up wounds. Near Kalamata we presently find ■him in charge of a rude field-hospital with eighteen wounded men ; and next at Grabousi — a fortified rock-islet on the northeast coast of Crete — as surgeon of the unlucky Cretan expedition he is dressing more wounds and performing more operations than might have fallen to his lot in a lifetime at home. From this service he returns to become sur- geon to the hospital at Nauplia. The second journal opens with his " commission from government as Director of the Medical Department in the Fleet " — with the high- sounding title of archichcirourgos — all this at twenty-five ! Assigned to the Karteria, he was brought into close relations with that brave and disinterested Philhellene, Captain Hastings; but his vivid journal of the siege of Athens breaks off abruptly some four months before the capitu- lation of the Acropolis. This took place on the fifth of June (see Fin- lay, VI. 222), not May 5, as Mrs. Richards dates it, evidently mistaking Howe's own date in the Historical Sketch (p. 425). On the fall of Athens Howe is induced by the Greek authorities to undertake a mission to America, only postponed while he assists in the distribution of relief then beginning to pour in from this country. In this service he found his permanent vocation to philanthropy; and the third journal, recording his ministrations to the suffering and starving peasantry of Peloponnesus and the islands, could hardly be surpassed in human interest by any chapter in Greek history. The historian's esti- mate of that service may be read in Finlay (VI. 437). Meantime, the glory of Navarino (October 20, 1827) had blotted out the shame of Athens ; and Howe returned home to take up his " first crusade ". In five