The embarkation of the British army, which in the summer of 1810 was deemed imminent both in England and the Peninsula and considered probable by Lord Liverpool himself, was no longer thought of after Busaco, save by a few of those croaking gentlemen, who, in camps as in council-houses, view every thing through smoked spectacles. Reinforcements, both English and Spanish, reached the lines of Torres Vedras, which Wellington continued to strengthen, and Massena dared not attack. The accession of General Drouet's corps increased the army of the Prince of Essling to upwards of 70,000 men. His cavalry, too, was twice as strong as that of the British; but, notwithstanding this superiority, and the desire which he must have felt to retrieve his fame, tarnished by the repulse at Busaco, and by his fruitless movement on the lines of Lisbon, Massena remained inert, in front of the man whom Napoleon's _Moniteur_ contemptuously designated as the "Sepoy General." Spring approached without either army assuming the offensive, until, on the 5th of March 1811, the French began their retreat from Portugal, closely followed up by Wellington. There was little difficulty in tracing them: they left a broad trail of blood, and desolation. With bare blade, and blazing brand, they swept across the land; church and convent, town and village, the farm and the cottage, were given to the flames; on the most frivolous pretexts, often without one, women, children, and unarmed men were barbarously murdered; and many a Portuguese lost his life for refusing to point out treasures which existed only in the imagination of the fierce and greedy Frenchman. Enraged at the dearth of provisions, of which they stood in great need, and which had been every-where removed or destroyed, the retreating army abandoned themselves to frightful cruelties and excesses. All along the line of march, the pursuers found piles of bodies, groups of murdered peasantry, and, mingled with them, the corpses of Frenchmen, often hideously mutilated, according to the barbarous usage which has been continued in more recent wars by the vindictive population of the Peninsula. The retaliation was terrible, but the provocation had been extreme. Mr Grattan's details of some of the scenes he himself witnessed, are painfully minute and vivid; and whilst reading them, we cease to wonder that, after the lapse of a third of a century, hatred of the French exists almost undiminished in the countries they so cruelly and wantonly ravaged.