consecrated by the use of holy oil, and by contact with the Body of our Lord! Overlooking all impediments in the way of their desires, the Junta calculated so surely upon delivering the capital, that they fixed upon a captain-general, a governor, and a corregidor, who were to enter upon their functions as soon ♦JOVELLANOS, § 103.♦ as it should be recovered; and they charged Jovellanos and Riquelme to draw up provisional ♦1809. NOVEMBER.♦ regulations for securing tranquillity there when the enemy should withdraw. This confidence arose from a national character which repeated disasters could neither subdue nor correct. The rashness with which they determined to bring on a general action, at whatever risk, appeared to them a prudent resolution. Now that the continental war was terminated, and Buonaparte had no other employment for his armies, it was certain that more troops than had been withdrawn from Spain would be marched into it, for the purpose of effecting its subjugation; they thought it therefore the best and surest policy to make a great effort before the numbers of the enemy should be thus formidably increased. Former failures had neither disheartened nor instructed them; and they furthered the equipment of the army with a zeal which, if it had been excited two months before in providing for their allies, might have realized the hopes wherein they now indulged. ♦CONDITION OF THE BRITISH ARMY.♦ The new commander partook the blind confidence of his government. In some degree he appears to have been deceived by them; for he was neither informed of Lord Wellington’s determination not to advance, nor of the condition of the British army, which was such at that time as to render an advance impossible. From causes which physiologists have not yet been able to ascertain, the country where they were quartered, upon the Guadiana, is peculiarly unhealthy during the dry season, when that river ceases to be a stream, and, like its feeders, is reduced to a succession of detached pools in the deeper parts of its course. The troops suffered so much more than the natives, partly because the disease laid stronger hold on constitutions which were not accustomed to it, and partly from the peculiar liableness of men, when congregated in camps, to receive and communicate endemic maladies, that more than a third of their whole number were on the sick list; and the inhabitants of the country, aware as they were that this plague belonged to it, ascribed its greater prevalence and malignity among the strangers to their having eaten mushrooms, holding the whole tribe themselves in abhorrence, and not thinking the ordinary causes of the disease could account for the effects which they witnessed. Areizaga was ignorant of all this, and the government allowed him to advance with an expectation that the British army was to follow and support him. ♦DISPOSITION OF THE FRENCH TROOPS.♦