As to printed sources of information, I have read all the Parliamentary papers of 1808-9, and the whole file of the _Madrid Gazette_, as well as many scores of memoirs and diaries, French, English, and Spanish. I think that no important English or French book has escaped me; but I must confess that some of the Spanish works quoted by General Arteche proved unprocurable, both in London and Paris. The British Museum Library is by no means strong in this department; it is even short of obvious authorities, such as the monographs of St. Cyr and of Cabanes on the War in Catalonia. The memoirs of the Peninsular veterans on both sides often require very cautious handling; some cannot be trusted for anything that did not happen under the author’s eye. Others were written so long after the events which they record, that they are not even to be relied upon for facts which must have been under his actual observation. For example, General Marbot claims that he brought to Bayonne the dispatch from Murat informing Napoleon of the insurrection of Madrid on May 2, and gives details as to the way in which the Emperor received the news. But it is absolutely certain, both from the text of Murat’s letter and from Napoleon’s answer to it, that the document was carried and delivered by a Captain Hannecourt. The aged Marbot’s memory had played him false. There are worse cases, where an eye-witness, writing within a short time of the events which he describes, gives a version which he must have known to be incorrect, for the glorification of himself or some friend. Thiébault and Le Noble are bad offenders in this respect: Thiébault’s account of some of the incidents in Portugal and of the combat of Aldea del Ponte, Le Noble’s narrative of Corunna, seem to be deliberately falsified. I have found one English authority who falls under the same suspicion. But on both sides the majority of the mistakes come either from writers who describe that which did not pass under their own eyes, or from aged narrators who wrote their story twenty, thirty, or forty years after the war was over. Their diaries written at the time are often invaluable correctives to their memoirs or monographs composed after an interval; e.g. Foy’s rough diary lately published by Girod de l’Ain contains some testimonials to Wellington and the British army very much more handsomely expressed than anything which the General wrote in his formal history of the early campaigns of 1808. I hope to insert in my second volume a bibliography of all the works useful for the first two years of the war. The inordinate size to which my first volume has swelled has made it impossible to include in it a list of authorities, which covers a good many pages.