The Henson Journals

[164]

Wednesday, February 13th, 1924.

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"Our church is holy, our priests are thieves", this was the invariable answer of Basili, Byron's Albanian servant, when he was rebuked for his rough treatment of the Greek clergy. "Indeed", says Byron, "a more abandoned race of miscreants cannot exist than the lower orders of the Greek clergy". (v: Note to Child Harolde ii.38) On one occasion he encountered a freethinker in the person of a Greek bishop. "This worthy hypocrite rallied his own religion with great intrepidity (but not before his flock), and talked of a mass as a "coglioneria" i.e a humbug. It was impossible to think better of him for this: but, for a Baeotian, he was brisk with all his absurdity". (Ibid)

Byron was under no delusion as to the depravity of the Greeks, whom he declared (in 1811) to be incapable of freedom, but he was just enough to make allowance for the moral effect of their long subjection to tyranny. (v. Works vol. ii p 189–191f) His description of the Turks is an admirable specimen of satirical writing. He pictures them as about on a level with the English: the parallel between their treatment of the Greeks and the English treatment of the Papists being worked out with good effect. "And shall we then emancipate our Irish Helots? Mahomet forbid! We would then be bad Musselmans, and worse Christians: at present we write the best of both – Jesuitical faith, and something not much inferior to Turkish toleration". This, in 1911 [sic], is pretty good, & from a lad of 23.

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