Early in July, Major Smith, the engineer of Tarifa, proposed a plan of siege, founded upon the facility furnished by the Chofre hills to destroy the flanks, rake the principal front, and form a breach with the same batteries; the works would, he observed, be secured, except at low water, by the Urumea, and counter-batteries could be constructed on the left of that river, to rake the line in which the breach was to be formed. Against the castle and its out-works he relied principally upon vertical fire, instancing the reduction of Fort Bourbon in the West Indies as proof of its efficacy. This plan would probably have reduced Sebastian in a reasonable time without any remarkable loss of men, and Lord Wellington approved of it, though he erroneously doubted the efficacy of the vertical fire. He renewed his approval after examining the works in person, and all his orders were in that spirit; but neither the plan nor his orders were followed, and the siege which should have been an ordinary event of war obtained a mournful celebrity. Wellington has been unjustly charged with a contempt for the maxims of the great masters of the art in his desire to save time: he did not urge the engineer here beyond the rules. _Take the place in the quickest manner, but do not from over speed fail to take it_, was the sense of his instructions. The haste was with Graham, one of England’s best soldiers, but of a genius intuitive rather than reflective, which, joined to great natural modesty and a certain easiness of temper, caused him at times to abandon his own correct conceptions for less judicious counsels of men who advised deviations from the original plan. In the night of the 10th two batteries were raised against the convent and redoubt of San Bartolomeo; and in that of the 13th, four batteries, to contain twenty of the heaviest guns and four eight-inch howitzers, were marked out on the Chofre sand-hills, at distances varying from six hundred to thirteen hundred yards from the eastern rampart of the town. No parallel of support was made, because the river was supposed unfordable, but good trenches of communications and subsequently regular approaches were formed. Two attacks were thus established--one on the right bank of the Urumea by the Portuguese brigades; one on the left bank by the fifth division: yet most of the troops were encamped on the right bank to facilitate a junction with the covering army in the event of a general battle. On the 14th a French sloop entered the harbour with supplies, and the batteries of the left attack opened against San Bartolomeo, throwing hot shot into the convent. The besieged responded with musketry from the redoubt, with heavy guns from the town, and with a field-piece which they had mounted on the belfry of the convent itself.