In this manner all their projects, characterized by a profound ignorance of war, were lightly adopted and as lightly abandoned, or ended in disasters; yet victory was more confidently anticipated, than if consummate skill had presided over the arrangements; and this vain-glorious feeling, extending to the military agents, was by them propagated in England, where the fore-boasting was nearly as loud, and as absurd, as in the Peninsula. The delusion was universal; even lord William Bentinck and Mr. Stuart, deceived by the curious consistency of the Spanish falsehoods, doubted if the French army was able to maintain its position, and believed that the Spaniards had obtained a moral ascendancy in the field. Drunk with vanity and folly, the leading Spaniards in the capital, feeling certain that the “remnants,” as they were called, of the French army on the Ebro, estimated at from thirty-five to forty thousand men, would be immediately destroyed, proposed that the British army should be directed upon Catalonia, and when they found that this proposal was not acceded to, they withdrew ten thousand men from the Murcian division, and sent them to the neighbourhood of Lerida. [Sidenote: Appendix, No. 6.] The natural pride and arrogance of the Spaniards were greatly aided by the timid and false operations of king Joseph. Twenty days after the evacuation of Madrid, that monarch was at the head of above fifty thousand fighting men, exclusive of eight thousand employed to maintain the communications, and to furnish the garrisons of Pampeluna, Tolosa, Irun, St. Sebastian, and Bilbao. The French army of Catalonia, seventeen thousand in number, was, as we have seen, distinct from the king’s command; but a strong reserve, assembled at Bayonne, under general Drouet, supplied him with reinforcements, and was itself supported by drafts from the depôts in the interior of France. Six thousand men, divided into several moveable columns, watched the openings of the Pyrenees, from St. Jean Pied de Port to Rousillon, and guarded the frontier from Spanish incursions; and a second reserve, composed of Neapolitans, Tuscans, and Piedmontese, was commenced at Belgarde, with a view of supporting Duhesme in Catalonia. How the king quelled the nascent insurrection at Bilbao, and how he dispersed the insurgents of the valleys in Aragon, I have already related. After those operations the French army was re-organized and divided into three grand divisions and a reserve. Marshal Bessieres retained the command of the right wing; marshal Moncey assumed that of the left; and marshal Ney arriving at this period from Paris, took charge of the centre; while the reserve, chiefly composed of detachments from the imperial guard, remained near the person of the king. The old republican general, Jourdan, a man whose day of glory belonged to another era, re-appeared upon the military stage, and filled the office of major-general to the army.