+----------+---------------+---------------------------+----------+---+---+---+---+---+---+----+---+---+---+----+----+---+----------------------------+ But his difficulties were not confined to the chilling advice of the Government. At a time when he required the best men in the army to aid him, the exercise of home patronage inflicted on him the most incapable assistants. Not merely did he suffer from useless subordinate staff officers, but even his general officers were not always what he wished. [Sidenote: Supplementary Despatches, vol. vi. p. 582.] “Really,” he wrote to Colonel Torrens, “when I reflect upon the characters and attainments of some of the general officers of this army, and consider that these are the persons on whom I am to rely to lead columns against the French Generals, and who are to carry my instructions into execution, I tremble; and, as Lord Chesterfield said of the Generals of his day, ‘I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names, he trembles as I do.’” And at the very time that these men were being sent out to him, he was debarred from offering reward, in the shape of promotion, to any one under his command whose gallantry might seem to him to have earned it. No subject is more frequently alluded to in his letters than this. The Government would gladly make political capital out of his successes,--would greedily gather votes by making appointments to his army, but declined to strengthen him by trusting his military knowledge, or increasing his legitimate authority. But the aggravation to which he had to submit in 1810 did not cease here. While the French were advancing into Portugal, and the English Government as little realised the strength of the lines which Wellington had prepared for his troops as Massena himself, the cry was always to embark,--to quit Lisbon,--to devote his energies to Cadiz; yet when strategical reasons and absolute necessity compelled him to leave Ciudad Rodrigo to its fate, the same voices, in querulous terror, remonstrated with him on his inaction. When he gained the victory of Busaco, the first idea with the Government was, not recognition of his merits, but political capital. And when, after a fruitless and self-destructive residence before the lines of Torres Vedras, Massena was obliged to retire from Portugal, who so loud in their cries for pursuit as the very men who had scoffed at the bare possibility of offering resistance to the French invaders?