country their paramount object, they busied themselves in framing a constitution; a work, which, if it had been more needful, might well have been deferred till a more convenient season. Great part of their sittings was consumed in metaphysical discussions, arising out of the scheme of the constitution; and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people was asserted in a temper which plainly manifested how surely that sovereignty, if it were once erected, would become unendurably tyrannical. Day after day these abstractions were debated, while the enemy was besieging Cadiz. Meantime no measures were adopted for bringing the army into a better state; and the mournful truth became apparent even to those who most reluctantly acknowledged it. But if it be difficult to form an effective army where there are none who have studied the principles and profited by the practice of war, it is yet more difficult to make legislators of men whose minds are ill disciplined, even when well stored. CHAPTER XXXV. AFFAIRS OF PORTUGAL. ROMANA’S DEATH. BADAJOZ TAKEN BY THE FRENCH. MASSENA’S RETREAT. ♦1810. EXPECTATIONS OF THE FRENCH.♦ Early in November, the besiegers before Cadiz fired a salute in honour of Massena’s triumphant entrance into Lisbon. Such demonstrations could not deceive the inhabitants of the Isle of Leon; but might serve to depress the Spaniards, who had no such means of information; and also to encourage the French themselves, whose confidence in their fortune had by this time received some abatement, and whose hopes of bringing the contest to an end rested chiefly now upon the success of the campaign in Portugal. Massena had undertaken the conquest of that kingdom in full expectation of outnumbering[16] any disciplined force which could be opposed to him, and still more certainly of outmanœuvring it; for the French Government well knew with what misplaced parsimony the military plans of the English were calculated; and they had neither reckoned upon the skill of the British general, nor the resolution of the British ministry, nor the spirit and exertions of the Portugueze people. He had been confirmed in this expectance by the cautious system which Lord Wellington had, through that parsimony, been compelled to observe during the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo: and though it was by an accident of war that Almeida had fallen into his hands, the speedy reduction of a place so important at that juncture increased the habitual confidence of one who had been accustomed to hear himself called the Child of Victory. That presumption had received a lesson at Busaco, and a check for which he was equally unprepared at the lines of Torres Vedras. Could Lord Wellington have spared a sufficient force to have occupied Santarem, as well as Abrantes; or had the orders of the Portugueze Regency for removing all provisions, been carried into full effect in that part of the country, he must soon have been compelled to retreat. The wonder,