But it was evident, that if the French could find, or carry, supplies, sufficient to maintain themselves until the British commander, forced back upon the sea, should embark or giving battle be defeated, the whole of this system must necessarily fall to pieces, and the miserable ruined people submit without further struggle. To avoid such a calamitous termination, it was necessary to find a position, covering Lisbon, where the allied forces could neither be turned by the flanks, nor forced in front by numbers, nor reduced by famine, and from which a free communication could be kept up with the irregular troops closing round the enemy. The mountains filling the tongue of land upon which Lisbon is situated, furnished this key-stone to the arch of defence. Accurate plans of all the positions, had been made under the directions of sir Charles Stuart in 1799, and, together with the French colonel Vincent’s minutes, shewing how they covered Lisbon, were in lord Wellington’s possession; and from those documents the original notion of the celebrated lines of Torres Vedras are said to have been derived; but the above-named officers only contemplated such a defence as might be made by an army in movement, before an equal or a greater force. It was lord Wellington, who first conceived the design, of turning those vast mountains into one stupendous and impregnable citadel, wherein to deposit the independence of the whole Peninsula. Hereafter the lines shall be described more minutely; at present it must suffice to observe, that intrenchments, inundations, and redoubts secured more than five hundred square miles of mountainous country lying between the Tagus and the ocean. Nor was this the most gigantic part of the English general’s undertaking. He was a foreigner, ill supported by his own government, and holding power under that of Portugal by a precarious tenure; he was vehemently opposed by the local authorities, by the ministers, and by the nobility of that country; and yet, in this apparently weak position, he undertook at one and the same time, to overcome the abuses engendered by centuries of misgovernment, and to oblige a whole people, sunk in sloth, to arise in arms, to devastate their own lands, and to follow him to battle against the most formidable power of modern times.