The passes of the Sierra Morena were occupied by five thousand raw levies, hastily made by the junta of Seville, after the defeat of St. Juan. Galluzzo, who had undertaken to defend the Tagus, with six thousand timid and ill-armed soldiers, was at this time in flight, having been suddenly attacked and defeated at Almaraz by a detachment of the fourth corps. Romana was near Leon, at the head of eighteen or twenty thousand runaways, collected by him after the dispersion at Reynosa; but of this number only five thousand were armed, and none were subordinate or capable of being disciplined; for when checked for misconduct, the marquis complained that they deserted. In Gallicia there was no army; in the Asturias, the local government were so corrupt, so faithless, and so oppressive, that the spirit of the people was crushed, and patriotism reduced to a name. [Sidenote: Stuart.] The central junta, having first repaired to Badajos, were terrified, and fled from thence to Seville, and their inactivity was more conspicuous in this season of adversity than before, and contrasted strangely with the pompous and inflated language of their public papers. Their promises were fallacious, their incapacity glaring, their exertions ridiculous and abortive; and the junta of Seville, still actuated by their own ambitious views, had now openly reassumed all their former authority. In short, the strength and spirit of Spain was broken, the enthusiasm was null, except in a few places, and the emperor was, with respect to the Spaniards, perfectly master of his operations. He was in the centre of the country; he held the capital; the fortresses; the command of the great lines of communication between the provinces; and on the wide military horizon, no dark cloud intercepted his view, save the heroic city of Zaragoza on the one side, and a feeble British army on the other. Sooner or later, he observed, and with truth, that the former must fall; it was an affair of artillery calculation. The latter, he naturally supposed to be in full retreat for Portugal; but the fourth corps were nearer to Lisbon than the British general; a hurried retreat alone could bring the latter in time to that capital, and consequently no preparations for defence could be made sufficient to arrest the sixty thousand Frenchmen which the emperor could carry there at the same moment. The subjugation of Spain appeared inevitable, when the genius and vigour of one man frustrated Napoleon’s plans at the very moment of execution; and the Austrian war breaking out at the instant, drew the master-spirit from the scene of contention. England then put forth all her vast resources; fortunately those resources were wielded by a general equal to the task of delivering the Peninsula, and it was delivered. But through what changes of fortune; by what unexpected helps; by what unlooked-for and extraordinary events; under what difficulties; and by whose