A large portion of the men who engaged under these leaders were soldiers, who had escaped in some of the miserable defeats to which the rashness of the Government and the incapacity of their generals had exposed them; or who had deserted from the regular army to this more inviting service. Smugglers also, a numerous and formidable class of men, now that their old occupation was destroyed, took to the guerrilla life, and brought to it the requisites of local knowledge, hardiness and audacity, and the quick sense of sight and hearing which they had acquired in carrying on their dangerous trade by night. But the greater number were men who, if circumstances had permitted, would have passed their life usefully and contentedly in the humble stations to which they were born; labourers, whom there were now none to employ, ... retainers, who partook the ruin of the great families to which they and their ancestors had been attached; ... owners or occupiers of land, whose fields had been laid waste, and whose olive-yards destroyed; and the whole class of provincial tradesmen, whose means of subsistence were cut off, happy if they had only their own ruin and their country’s quarrel to revenge, and not those deeper injuries of which dreadful cases were continually occurring wherever the enemy were masters. Monks, also, and friars, frocked and unfrocked, were among them: wherever the convents were suppressed, and their members forbidden to wear the habit on pain of death, which was done in all the provinces that the French overran, the young took arms, the old employed themselves in keeping up the spirit of the people; and the intrusive Government paid dearly for the church property, when those who had been previously supported by it exchanged a life of idleness for one of active exertion in the national cause, some to preach a crusade against the invaders, others to serve in it. These whom oppression had driven out from the cloister were not the only religioners who took arms. Not a few in the parts of the country which were still free took the opportunity, precious to them, of escaping from the servitude to which they were bound, disgusted with the follies of their profession, sick of its impostures, or impatient of its restraints. Public opinion encouraged them in this course; the multitude ascribing their conduct to a religious zeal for their country, while those who wished for the reformation of the abuses which had prepared the way for all this evil, were glad to see this disposition manifest itself in a class of men whom they justly regarded as one of the pests of Spain. The General of the Franciscans applied to Mendizabal to deliver up a friar who had enlisted in his army; but the application was so little in accord with the spirit of the times, that Mendizabal’s answer was read with universal approbation by the Spaniards. “The head of the Franciscans,” said that commander, “must have forgotten what Cardinal