and, in sad anticipation of defeat, deferred acting, when activity and enterprise might have found or made opportunities for success. ♦CONDUCT OF THE FRENCH UNDER ST. CYR.♦ It was their victories which made the French most sensible of the difference between this and the other wars wherein they had been engaged; ... the spoils of the field were the only fruits of success. These indeed had been of signal consequence in Catalonia; they had enabled St. Cyr to relieve Barcelona, to refit his troops, and to strengthen himself with a park of field-pieces. He had profited by the first panic to dislodge the Spaniards from the pass of Bruch, which they had twice so gloriously defended; his troops had entered Igualada after the success, and the dangerous impression which his ostentation of justice and his observance of the humanities of war were likely to produce upon the wealthier classes, was seen by the conduct of the inhabitants, who seemed to think it a matter of indifference whether their houses were occupied by the national troops or by the French. But the system upon which Buonaparte carried on this wicked war rendered it impossible for any general to persist in a course of honourable conduct. The army which he had ordered into Catalonia was left to provide for itself, in a province which had now been many months the seat of war, and which never even in peace produced half its own consumption of corn. It had also to store the places of Rosas, Figueras, and Barcelona; for no attempt was made to bring provisions from France by land ... (the pass indeed between Bellegarde and Figueras was so dangerous to the French, that they called it the Straits of Gibraltar); and it was seldom that a vessel could escape the vigilance of the British cruisers. Eleven victuallers intended for Barcelona were lying in the port of Caldaques under convoy of a cutter and a lugger, when Lord Cochrane landed his men, drove the French from the town, took their batteries, and captured the whole. St. Cyr, however humane by nature, however honourable by principle, was engaged in a service with which humanity and honour were incompatible: he could support his army by no other means than by plundering the inhabitants, and the Catalans were not a people who would endure patiently to be plundered. The difficulty was increased by the Moorish custom still retained in that part of Spain of preserving corn, not in barns or granaries, but in mattamores. In the towns these subterranean magazines were emptied before the French could enter; in the country they were so easily concealed, that, after long and wearying search, it was a rare fortune to discover one. And the Miquelets and Somatenes were so constantly on the alert, that frequently when the marauders had seized their booty they were deprived of it. In this sort of warfare their loss was generally greater than that of the natives, who on such occasions had them at vantage. How considerable ♦ST. CYR, 92–99.♦ it