BOOK XVI. CHAPTER I. [Sidenote: 1811.] Up to this period, the invasion, although diversified by occasional disasters on the part of the invaders, had been progressive. The tide, sometimes flowing, sometimes ebbing, had still gained upon the land, and wherever the Spaniards had arrested its progress, it was England that urged their labour and renovated their tired strength; no firm barrier, no solid dike, had been opposed to its ravages, save by the British general in Portugal, and even there the foundation of his work, sapped by the trickling waters of folly and intrigue, was sliding away. By what a surprising effort of courage and judgment he secured it shall now be shown; and as the field operations, in this war, were always influenced more by political considerations, than by military principles, it will be necessary first to place the general’s situation with respect to the former in its true light. _Political situation of king Joseph._ France, abounding in riches and power, was absolute mistress of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Vistula; but Napoleon, resolute to perfect his continental system for the exclusion of British goods, now found himself, in the pursuit of that object, hastening rapidly to a new war, and one so vast, that even his force was strained to meet it. The Peninsula already felt relief from this cause. The dread of his arrival ceased to influence the operations of the allied army in Portugal, many able French officers were recalled, and as it was known that the imperial guards, and the Polish troops, were to withdraw from Spain, the scale of offensive projects was necessarily contracted. Conscripts and young soldiers instead of veterans, and in diminished numbers, were now to be expected; and in the French army there was a general, and oppressive sense, of the enormous exertion which would be required to bring two such mighty wars to a happy conclusion. On the other hand, the Peninsulars were cheered by seeing so powerful a monarch, as the czar, rise in opposition to Napoleon, and the English general found the principal basis of his calculations realized by this diversion. He had never yet been strong enough to meet eighty thousand French troops in battle, even under a common general; but his hopes rose when he saw the great warrior of the age, not only turning himself from the contest, but withdrawing from it a reserve of four hundred thousand veterans, whose might the whole world seemed hardly able to withstand.