As Mr. Stuart could obtain no assistance from the English merchants of Lisbon, to aid him in a traffic which interfered with their profits, he wrote circular letters to the consuls in the Mediterranean, and in the Portuguese islands, and to the English minister at Washington, desiring them to negotiate treasury bills; to increase the shipments of corn to Lisbon, and pay with new bills, to be invested in such articles of British manufacture as the non-importation law still permitted to go to America. By this complicated process he contrived to keep something in the military chest; and this commerce, which lord Wellington truly observed, was not what ought to have occupied his time and attention, saved the army, and the people, when the proceedings of Mr. Perceval would have destroyed both. Yet it was afterwards cavilled at and censured by the ministers, on the representations of the merchants who found their exorbitant gains interrupted by it. Pressed by such accumulated difficulties, and not supported in England as he deserved, the general, who had more than once intimated his resolution to withdraw from the Peninsula, now seriously thought of executing it. Yet when he considered, that the cause was one even of more interest to England than to the Peninsula; that the embarrassments of the French might be even greater than his own, and that Napoleon himself, gigantic as his exertions had been, and were likely to be, was scarcely aware of the difficulty of conquering the Peninsula while an English army held Portugal; when he considered also, that light was breaking in the north of Europe, that the chances of war are many, even in the worst of times, and above all, when his mental eye caught the beams of his own coming glory, he quelled his rising indignation, and re-tempered his mighty energies to bear the buffet of the tempest. But he could not remove the obstacles that choked his path, nor could he stand still, lest the ground should open beneath his feet. If he moved in the north, Marmont’s army and the army under Bessieres were ready to oppose him, and he must take Ciudad Rodrigo or blockade it before he could even advance against them. To take that place required a battering-train, to be brought up through a mountainous country from Lamego, and there was no covering position for the army during the siege. To blockade and pass it, would so weaken his forces, already inferior to the enemy, that he could do nothing effectual; meanwhile Soult would have again advanced from Llerena, and perhaps have added Elvas to his former conquests.