He forbade any inhabitant of the province to enter Soria while the enemy kept a garrison there, on pain of being regarded as a traitor, whatever motive or excuse he might allege. He declared that every person obeying an order of the intrusive Government should be put to death, ... every village burnt, ... so that nothing might exist in Spain which had contributed towards its subjugation. Whenever the enemy approached a village, the inhabitants were enjoined to leave it, driving all their cattle into the mountains; and they were commanded not to leave provision of any kind in their houses, unless it were poisoned; to the end that either by want or by poison, the enemy, who were employed in destroying an unoffending people, might be themselves destroyed. The state of feeling may be understood in which such an edict could be issued by a provincial Junta who lived in hourly peril, and whose dearest connexions were the victims of foreign barbarity; but when the edict itself was sanctioned by the national Government--for sanctioned it was by being allowed to appear in the Regency’s Gazette unannulled and uncensured--it became a national disgrace. When the guerrillas of Asturias, the Biscayan provinces, Soria, or Rioja, were closely pressed by the enemy, they usually sought refuge in Navarre, or the higher parts of Aragon: here they had their chief strength. The French, indeed, complained, in their intercepted dispatches, that these bands gave the law in Navarre, levied contributions there, and even collected the duties at the frontier custom-houses. For this ♦XAVIER MINA.♦ superiority they were beholden to Xavier Mina. His career was short, but remarkable not less for the signal successes which he obtained, than for his hair-breadth escapes. On one occasion he and his little party were driven to seek refuge on a rock near Estella, where they defended the only accessible side till night-fall, and escaped during the darkness by letting themselves down the precipice by a rope. In the course of five months after his first appearance in the field, his celebrity was such that he might have raised an army from among the youth of Navarre and Upper Aragon, if there had been means to arm, and officers to discipline them: owing to the want of these, and chiefly of officers, he never had more than 1,200 under his command; greater numbers would have embarrassed him, these he was capable of directing: voluntary rations were provided for them by the villages, and for ammunition and money he looked to the enemy, calling the wood of Tafalla his powder-magazine and his mint. As a farther resource, he levied the duties of which the French complained, and he collected the rents belonging to the convents and churches, as having in this extremity reverted to the nation; and from these funds he was enabled to pay liberally and regularly for intelligence. The wisdom of his measures, not less than the chivalrous