The march itself was a memorable instance of "enterprise." It was a movement of four hundred miles, through one of the most difficult portions of the Peninsula, by a route never before attempted by an army, and which, probably, no other general in Europe would have attempted. Its conduct was so admirable, that it was scarcely suspected by the French; its movement was so rapid, that it outstripped them; and its direction was so skilful, that King Joseph and his marshal had scarcely encamped, and thought themselves out of the reach of attack, when they saw the English columns overtopping the heights surrounding the valley of the Zadora. In his last Spanish battle, the victory of the Pyrenees, where he had to defend a frontier of sixty miles, he drove Soult over the mountains, and was the first of all the generals engaged in Continental hostilities, to plant his columns on French ground! Those are the facts of _seven years_ of the most perilous war, against the most powerful monarch whom Europe had seen for a thousand years. The French army in the Peninsula had varied from 150,000 to 300,000 men. It was constantly recruited from a national force of 600,000. It was under the authority of a great military sovereign, wholly irresponsible, and commanding the entire resources of the most populous, warlike, and powerful of Continental states. The British general, on the other hand, was exposed to every difficulty which could embarrass the highest military skill. He had to guide the councils of the two most self-willed nations in existence. He had to train native armies, which scoffed at English discipline; he had the scarcely less difficult task of contending with the fluctuating opinions of public men in England: yet he never shrank; he never was shaken in council, and he never was defeated in the field. But by what means were all this succession of unbroken victories achieved? Who can listen to the French babbling, which tells us that it was done, simply by _standing still to be beaten_? The very nature of the war, with an army composed of the raw battalions of England, which had not seen a shot fired since the invasion of Holland in 1794, a period of fourteen years; his political anxieties from his position with the suspicious governments of Spain and Portugal, and not less with his own fluctuating Legislature; his encounters with a force quadruple his own, commanded by the most practised generals in Europe, and under the supreme direction of the conqueror of the Continent--A condition of things so new, perplexing, and exposed to perpetual hazard, in itself implies _enterprise_, a character of sleepless activity, unwearied resource, and unhesitating intrepidity--all the very reverse of passiveness.