It was at this period that the offer of a Russian auxiliary force, before alluded to, being made to Wellington by admiral Grieg, was accepted by him to the amount of fifteen thousand men, and yet was not fulfilled because the Russian ambassador in London declared that the emperor knew nothing of it! Alexander however proposed to mediate in the dispute between Great Britain and America, but the English ministers, while lauding him as a paragon of magnanimity and justice, in regard to the war against Napoleon, remembered the armed neutrality and quadruple alliance, and wisely declined trusting England’s maritime pretensions to his faithless grasping policy. Neither would they listen to Austria, who at this time, whether with good faith or merely as a cloak I know not, desired to mediate a general peace. However, amidst this political confusion the progress of the military preparations was visible; and contemporary with the Portuguese, the Spanish troops under Wellington’s influence and providence acquired more consistence than they had ever before possessed; a mighty power was in arms; but the flood of war with which the English general finally poured into Spain, and the channels by which he directed the overwhelming torrent, must be reserved for another place. It is now time to treat of the political situation of king Joseph, and to resume the narrative of that secondary warfare which occupied the French armies while Wellington was uninterruptedly as far as the enemy were concerned, reorganizing his power. CHAPTER III. [Sidenote: 1813.] In war it is not so much the positive strength, as the relative situations of the hostile parties, which gives the victory. Joseph’s position, thus judged, was one of great weakness, principally because he was incapable of combining the materials at his disposal, or of wielding them when combined by others. France had been suddenly thrown by her failure in Russia, into a new and embarrassing attitude, more embarrassing even than it appeared to her enemies, or than her robust warlike proportions, nourished by twelve years of victory, indicated. Napoleon, the most indefatigable and active of mankind, turned his enemy’s ignorance on this head to profit; for scarcely was it known that he had reached Paris by that wise, that rapid journey, from Smorghoni, which, baffling all his enemies’ hopes, left them only the power of foolish abuse; scarcely I say, was his arrival at Paris known to the world, than a new and enormous army, the constituent parts of which he had with his usual foresight created while yet in the midst of victory, was in march from all parts to unite in the heart of Germany.