resisting Junot during the days of his power. [273] Wellesley to Lord Castlereagh, Sept. 9 (_Well. Disp._, iv. 137). In spite of Napier’s denunciation of the Bishop, Wellesley bears good witness in his favour, e.g. iv. 146. On the reconstitution of the Regency the Junta of Oporto, with more self-denial than had been expected, dissolved itself. The minor juntas in the Algarve, the Alemtejo, and the Tras-os-Montes followed its example, and Portugal was once more in possession of a single executive, whose authority was freely recognized throughout the kingdom. Unfortunately it turned out to be slow, timid, and divided into cliques which were always at variance with each other. We have already seen that owing to various causes of delay, of which Galluzzo’s preposterous proceedings at Elvas were the most prominent, the last French troops did not quit Portugal till September had expired, and that Junot himself and the main body of his army had only begun to leave on the fifteenth of that month. It would have been impossible for Dalrymple to advance into Spain till the French had left Lisbon, however urgently his presence might have been required. But it would perhaps have proved feasible to push forward towards the Spanish frontier a considerable part of his army, and to make preparations for the movement of the whole towards Madrid or Salamanca as soon as the evacuation should be complete. Dalrymple, however, was as leisurely as the generals of the old days before the Revolutionary War. He kept his troops cantoned about Lisbon, only pushing forward two brigades towards Elvas in order to bring Galluzzo to reason, and dispatching the 6th Regiment as a garrison to Almeida. He seems to have been quite as much interested in the administration of Portugal as in the further prosecution of the war in Spain. We find him much busied in the reconstruction of the Portuguese government and army, reviewing and rearming the Spanish division of Caraffa before shipping it off to Catalonia [Sept. 22], and spending a great deal of time over the redistribution into brigades and divisions of his army, which had now swelled to something like 35,000 men, by the arrival of Moore’s force and certain regiments from Madeira, Gibraltar, and England. He was also engaged in endeavours to organize a proper commissariat for this large body of men, a hard task, for every brigade arrived in the same state of destitution as to means of transport as had those which landed with Wellesley at Mondego Bay on the first of August. But in all his actions there was evident a want of vigour and of purposeful resource, which was very distressing to those of his subordinates who were anxious for a rapid and decisive advance towards the main theatre of war in Spain.