we see their fires, we hear their artillery, we hear their insolent threats, and witness their ravages. Their rash endeavours, beyond a doubt, will fail against these intrenchments, where the watch-tower is erected which presents to all good patriots a beacon in the midst of the tempest. But the Isle of Leon, thus threatened by the enemy, cannot be at present a proper place for the celebration of our Cortes; and necessity compels us to delay it till the present crisis shall be past, and place and time suitable for so august an assembly can be assigned. Meantime, none of the measures and forms established and decreed for the convocation are to be suspended for a moment. The elections are to proceed, and the members who are chosen must hold themselves ready to perform their functions; the intention of the Government being, that the Cortes shall meet as soon as the circumstances of the war permit.” Notwithstanding this language, it is possible that Spain was indebted for its Cortes more to the annunciation from Seville that the Intruder was about to convoke one, than to the inclination of its own rulers. The central Junta had delayed it not from intentional procrastination, but from their sense of the difficulty of the task, and from the deliberation which so peculiarly characterizes the Spaniards. They had overcome the difficulties, and framed a plan of representation, which preserved a due respect to old venerable forms, and was well adapted to the existing circumstances of the country; this having been done, as soon as it was ascertained that Cadiz might defy the enemy there ought to have been no delay. That was ascertained in February, as soon as the Isle of Leon was secured from a coup-de-main. But it was not till the middle of June that a decree was ♦CORTES CONVOKED.♦ issued, ordering the elections to be completed as soon as possible, and requiring the deputies to assemble in the island during the month of August, that as soon as the greater part of them were met the sessions might begin. The plan which the central Junta framed was altered in one most material point, only one house being convoked. Had Jovellanos and his colleagues determined thus, they would still have summoned the privileged orders; but the Regency, departing inconsiderately from a resolution which had been the effect of long deliberation, neither summoned them to meet apart from the third estate, nor with it, nor devised any plan for representing them; so that two of the three estates were excluded as such from the national representation.