effect, such an amount of force as may place that important place out of the reach of immediate danger, _even though it should for the time suspend operations against the Tagus_[12].” In England at this period, personal enmity to Napoleon, and violent party prejudices, had so disturbed the judgments of men relative to that monarch, that any information speaking of strength or success for him, was regarded with suspicion even by the ministers, who, as commonly happens in such cases, becoming the dupes of their own practices, listened with complacency to all those tales of mutiny among his troops, disaffection of his generals, and insurrections in France, which the cunning or folly of their agents transmitted to them. Hence sprung such projects as the one above, the false calculations of which may be exposed by a short comparative statement. The whole English force was not much above thirty thousand men, distributed off Cadiz, off the coast of Portugal, on the eastern parts of England, and in the channel. The French force in Spain and Portugal was about a hundred and twenty thousand men: they possessed all the Portuguese, and most of the Spanish fortresses. The English army had no reserve, no fixed plan, and it was to be divided, and to act upon a double line of operations. The French had a strong reserve at Bayonne, and the grand French army of four hundred thousand veterans was untouched, and ready to succour the troops in the Peninsula if they required it. Happily, this visionary plan was in no particular followed by the generals entrusted with the conduct of it. A variety of causes combined to prevent the execution. The catastrophe of Baylen marred all the great combinations of the French emperor; fortune drew the scattered divisions of the English army together, and the decisive vigour of sir Arthur Wellesley sweeping away these cobweb projects, obtained all the success that the bad arrangements of the ministers would permit. In the next chapter, resuming the thread of the history, I shall relate the proceedings of the first British campaign in the Peninsula; but I judged it necessary first to make an exposition of the previous preparations and plans of the cabinet, lest the reader’s attention not being fully awakened to the difficulties cast in the way of the English generals by the incapacity of the government, should, with hasty censure, or niggard praise, do the former injustice; for, as a noble forest hides many noisome swamps and evil things, so the duke of Wellington’s laurels have covered the innumerable errors of the ministers. CHAPTER IV. [Sidenote: Sir A. Wellesley’s Narrative. Court of Inquiry.]