It will be recollected that the narrative of Catalonian affairs ceased at the moment when Decaen, after fortifying the coast line and opening new roads beyond the reach of shot from the English ships, was gathering the harvest of the interior. Lacy, inefficient in the field and universally hated, was thus confined to the mountain chain which separates the coast territory from the plains of Lerida, and from the Cerdaña. The insurrectionary spirit of the Catalonians was indeed only upheld by Wellington’s successes, and by the hope of English succour from Sicily; for Lacy, devoted to the republican party in Spain, had now been made captain-general as well as commander-in-chief, and sought to keep down the people, who were generally of the priestly and royal faction. He publicly spoke of exciting a general insurrection, yet, in his intercourse with the English naval officers, avowed his wish to repress the patriotism of the Somatenes; he was not ashamed to boast of his assassination plots, and received with honour, a man who had murdered the aide-de-camp of Maurice Mathieu; he sowed dissentions amongst his generals, intrigued against all of them in turn, and when Eroles and Manso, who were the people’s favourites, raised any soldiers, he transferred the latter as soon as they were organized to Sarzfield’s division, at the same time calumniating that general to depress his influence. He quarrelled incessantly with captain Codrington, and had no desire to see an English force in Catalonia lest a general insurrection should take place, for he feared that the multitude once gathered and armed would drive him from the province and declare for the opponents of the cortez. And in this view the constitution itself, although emanating from the cortez, was long withheld from the Catalans, lest the newly declared popular rights should interfere with the arbitrary power of the chief. [Sidenote: July.] [Sidenote: See Book XVII. Chap. II.]