the marquis of Romana, but twenty thousand were already partially concentrated in Portugal. The remainder, in which were comprised eleven thousand Swiss and thirty thousand militia, were dispersed in various parts of the kingdom, principally in Andalusia. Besides this force, there was a sort of local reserve called the urban militia, much neglected, and indeed more a name than a reality. Nevertheless the advantage of such an institution was considerable; men were to be had in abundance: and as the greatest difficulty in a sudden crisis is to prepare the frame-work of order, it was no small resource to find a plan of service ready, the principle of which was understood by the people. [Sidenote: Napoleon’s notes. Appendix, No. 3.] [Sidenote: Thiebault.] [Sidenote: Dupont’s Journal. MSS.] The French army in the Peninsula about the same period, although amounting to eighty thousand men, exclusive of those under Junot in Portugal, had not more than seventy thousand capable of active operations; the remainder were sick or in depôts. The possession of the fortresses, the central position, and the combination of this comparatively small army, gave it great strength; but it had also many points of weakness; it was made up of the conscripts of different nations, French, Swiss, Italians, Poles, and even Portuguese, whom Junot had expatriated, partly to strengthen the French army, partly to weaken the nation which he held in subjection; and it is a curious fact, that some of them remained in Spain until the end of the war. A few of the imperial guards were also employed, and here and there an old regiment of the line was mixed with the young troops to give them consistence; but with these exceptions the French army must be considered as a raw levy fresh from the plough and unacquainted with discipline: so late even as the month of August many of the battalions had not completed the first elements of their drill, and if they had not been formed upon good skeletons, the difference between them and the insurgent peasantry would have been very trifling. This fact explains, in some measure, the otherwise incomprehensible checks and defeats which the French sustained at the commencement of the contest, and it likewise proves how little of vigour there was in Spanish resistance at the moment of the greatest enthusiasm. [Sidenote: Napoleon’s notes, Appendix, No. 2.]