Byron showed
a remarkable familiarity with the Scriptures, and with parts of Barrow,
Chillingworth, and Stillingfleet; but on Kennedy's lending for his
edification Boston's _Fourfold State_, he returned it with the remark that
it was too deep for him. On another occasion he said, "Do you know I am
nearly reconciled to St. Paul, for he says there is no difference between
the Jews and the Greeks? and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the
character of both is equally vile." The good Scotchman's religious
self-confidence is throughout free from intellectual pride; and his own
confession, "This time I suspect his lordship had the best of it," might
perhaps be applied to the whole discussion.
Critics who have little history and less war have been accustomed to
attribute Byron's lingering at Cephalonia to indolence and indecision;
they write as if he ought on landing on Greek soil to have put himself at
the head of an army and stormed Constantinople. Those who know more,
confess that the delay was deliberate, and that it was judicious. The
Hellenic uprising was animated by the spirit of a "lion after slumber,"
but it had the heads of a Hydra hissing and tearing at one another.
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