Thus, after four years of captivity, Zaragoza was delivered from its detested enemies. During the greater part of that time no tidings but those of ill fortune had reached the Zaragozans, ... the defeat of their armies, the capture of one strong hold after another, some having yielded through famine, others to the strength and skill of the besiegers, and more having been basely or traitorously given up. And though they well knew that the journals of the Intrusive Government, like those in France, were conducted upon a system of falsehood, suppressing every thing which could not be made appear favourable to Buonaparte’s views, they could not doubt the substance of these tidings, nor, in some of the worst cases, the extent of the national loss. The prisoners who were taken in Blake’s defeat before Murviedro, and the still greater number who surrendered with him at Valencia, had been marched through the streets of Zaragoza, in the depth of winter, and in a condition which would have moved any soldiers to compassion except those of Buonaparte and of the generals whom he employed in Spain: without shoes and stockings, foot-sore, half naked, half famished, they were driven and outraged and insulted by an enemy who seemed, together with the observances of civilized war, to have renounced the feelings of humanity. At such times the Zaragozans, without distinction of rank or sex, crowded about their unfortunate countrymen to administer what consolation they could, to weep over them, and to share with them their own scanty supplies of clothing and of food. On such occasions, too, all the respectable families, as if by one consent, kept days of mourning and humiliation[1], each in their houses: and more earnest prayers were never offered up than they breathed in bitterness of soul for the deliverance of their injured country, and for vengeance upon their merciless and insolent oppressors.