The besieging army consisted of the fifth division under general Oswald, and the independent Portuguese brigades of J. Wilson and Bradford reinforced by detachments from the first division. Thus, including the artillery-men some seamen commanded by lieutenant O’Reilly of the Surveillante and one hundred regular sappers and miners, now for the first time used in the sieges of the Peninsula, nearly ten thousand men were employed. The guns available for the attack, in the first instance, were a new battering train originally prepared for the siege of Burgos, consisting of fourteen iron twenty-four pounders, six eight-inch brass howitzers, four sixty-eight-pound iron carronades, and four iron ten-inch mortars. To these were added six twenty-four pounders lent by the ships of war, and six eighteen pounders which had moved with the army from Portugal, making altogether forty pieces commanded by colonel Dickson. The distance from the depôt of siege at Passages to the Chofre sand-hills was one mile and a half of good road, and a pontoon bridge was laid over the Urumea river above the Chofres, but from thence to the height of Bartolomeo was more than five miles of very bad road. Early in July the fortress had been twice closely examined by Major Smith, the engineer who had so ably defended Tarifa. He proposed a plan of siege founded upon the facility furnished by the Chofre hills to destroy the flanks, rake the principal front and form a breach with the same batteries, the works being at the same time secured, except at low water, by the Urumea. Counter-batteries, to be constructed on the left of that river, were to rake the line of defence in which the breach was to be formed; and against the castle and its outworks he relied principally upon vertical fire, instancing the reduction of Fort Bourbon in the West Indies in proof of its efficacy. This plan would probably have reduced San Sebastian in a reasonable time without any remarkable loss of men, and lord Wellington approving of it, though he doubted the efficacy of the vertical fire, ordered the siege to be commenced. He renewed his approval afterwards when he had examined the works in person, and all his orders were in the same spirit; but neither the plan nor his orders were followed, the siege, which should have been an ordinary event of war has obtained a mournful celebrity, and lord Wellington has been unjustly charged with a contempt for the maxims of the great masters of the art. Anxious he was no doubt to save time, yet he did not for that urge the engineer beyond the rules. _Take the place in the quickest manner, yet do not from over speed fail to take it_, was the sense of his instructions; but sir Thomas Graham, one of England’s best soldiers, appears to have been endowed with a genius for war intuitive rather than reflective; and this joined to his natural modesty and a certain easiness of temper, caused him at times to abandon his own correct conceptions, for the less judicious