choose; but whatever it be, make your choice with sincerity, and tell me only your genuine sentiments.” There was something more detestable in this affectation of candour and generosity than in his open and insolent violence. “Consult! and consider what part you will choose, and make your choice with sincerity!”... The Spanish nation had made their choice! They had made it at Baylen and at Reynosa, at Cadiz and at Madrid, at Valencia and at Zaragoza; for life or for death; deliberately, and yet as if with one impulse, ... with enthusiasm, and yet calmly, ... had that noble people nobly, and wisely, and religiously made their heroic choice. They had written it in blood, their own and their oppressors’. Its proofs were to be seen in deserted houses and depopulated towns, in the blackened walls of hamlets which had been laid waste with fire, in the bones which were bleaching upon the mountains of Biscay, and in the bodies, French and Spaniard, which were at that hour floating down the tainted Ebro! Here, in the capital, their choice had been recorded; they who had been swept down by grape-shot in its streets, or bayoneted in the houses, they who had fallen in the heat of battle before its gates, and they who in cold blood had been sent in droves to execution, alike had borne witness to that choice, and confirmed it, and rejoiced in it with their dying breath. And this tyrant called upon the people of Madrid now to tell him their sentiments, ... now when their armies were dispersed, and they themselves, betrayed and disarmed, were surrounded by his legions! ♦REGISTERS OPENED.♦ Registers were opened in every quarter, and, if French accounts could be believed, 30,000 fathers of families rushed thither in crowds, and signed a supplication to the conqueror, entreating him to put an end to their misfortunes, by granting them his august brother Joseph for their king. If this impossible eagerness had really been manifested, it could admit of no other solution than that the people of Madrid, bitterly as they detested and heartily as they despised Joseph, yet thought it a less evil to be governed by him than by the tyrant himself, ... for this was the alternative allowed them. But a census of this kind, as it is called, like those which coloured Buonaparte’s assumption, first of the consulship for life, and then of an hereditary throne, was easily procured, when neither threats, nor persuasions, nor fraud, nor violence were spared. ♦THE PEOPLE OF MADRID TAKE THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE TO JOSEPH.♦