The meeting was hindered, and, without listening either to the
personal courtesies or to the diplomatic arguments of the Duke of
Wellington, Lord Cochrane continued his preparations for active
service in Greek waters. The details of these preparations and their
practical execution, as has been shown, he was forced to leave in
other and less competent hands, and their actual supervision was still
impossible to him. Gradually the irritating and wasteful obstacles for
which Mr. Galloway was chiefly responsible induced him to resolve upon
following the advice tendered in December by Mr. Hobhouse and Captain
Hastings--that is, to go to Greece with a small portion only of
the naval armament for which he had stipulated, and which his most
cautious friends deemed necessary to his enterprise. To this he was
driven, not only by a desire to do something worthy of his great name,
and something really helpful to the cause which he had espoused,
but also by the knowledge that the tedious delays that arose were
squandering all the money with which he had counted upon rendering his
work efficient when he could get to Greece.

Of this he received frequent and clear intimation from all his
friends in London, though from none so emphatically as from the Greek
deputies, Orlando and Luriottis, who, being themselves grievously to
blame for their peculations and their bad management, threw all the
blame upon Mr. Galloway and the other defaulters. Finding that the
proceeds of the second Greek loan were being rapidly exhausted by
their own and others' wrong-doing, they were even audacious enough to
propose to Lord Cochrane that, not abandoning his Greek engagement,
but rather continuing it under conditions involving much greater risk
and anxiety than had been anticipated, he should return the 37,000_l._
which had been handed over to Sir Francis Burdett on his account, and
take as sole security for his ultimate recompense the two frigates