Passing over as already sufficiently illustrated that master-stroke, the battle of Salamanca, the reader would do well to mark, how this great commander did, after that event, separate the king’s army from Marmont’s, forcing the one to retreat upon Burgos, and driving the other from Madrid; how he thus broke up the French combinations, so that many weeks were of necessity required to reunite a power capable of disturbing him in the field; how he posted Clinton’s division and the Gallicians, to repress any light excursion by the beaten army of Portugal; how, foreseeing Soult’s plan to establish a new base of operations in Andalusia, he was prepared, by a sudden descent from Madrid, to drive Soult himself from that province; how promptly, when the siege of Burgos failed, and his combinations were ruined by the fault of others, how promptly I say, he commenced his retreat, sacrificing all his high-wrought expectation of triumph in a campaign which he burned to finish, and otherwise would have finished, even with more splendour than it had commenced. If Burgos, a mean fortress of the lowest order, had fallen early, the world would have seen a noble stroke. For the Gallicians, aided by a weak division of Wellington’s army, and by the British reinforcements making up from Coruña, would, covered by Burgos, have sufficed to keep the army of Portugal in check, while Popham’s armament would have fomented a general insurrection of the northern provinces. Meanwhile Wellington, gathering forty-five thousand Anglo-Portuguese, and fifteen thousand Spaniards, on the Tagus, would have marched towards Murcia; Ballesteros’ army, and the sixteen thousand men composing the Alicant army, would there have joined him, and with a hundred thousand soldiers he would have delivered such a battle to the united French armies, if indeed they could have united, as would have shaken all Europe with its martial clangor. To exchange this glorious vision, for the cold desolate reality of a dangerous winter retreat was, for Wellington, but a momentary mental struggle, and it was simultaneous with that daring conception, the passage of the bridge of Burgos under the fire of the castle.