Into the construction of this poem it is unfit that I should enter further than to state, that the action, which is in some degree formed on the purest ancient model, comprises a period of about two months, commencing a month before and ending a month after the taking of San Sebastian by storm. The besieged city forms the central point, and the events there, with superadded imaginative incidents, are combined with the fighting round San Sebastian, of which the object was on one side to relieve, and on the other to prevent the relief of that fortress. These are what are usually known by the name of the Battles of the Pyrenees, and commenced with the first battle of Sauroren, which was fought on the 28th July, 1813; the storming of San Sebastian occurred on the 31st of August; and the action of the poem concludes with the passage of the Bidassoa, and the advance of the Allied Army to the Greater Rhune, by which the Spanish soil was freed from the presence of the Invader--events which occurred on the 7th and 8th of October. The second siege of San Sebastian commenced contemporaneously with the first battle of Sauroren, on the 28th July.[A] The actual time therefore employed in the action is precisely two months and twelve days. The battles of the Pyrenees introduced are essentially interwoven with the main subject, which is the capture of the great fortress of San Sebastian, the principal event of the latter part of the War while it was confined to the Spanish soil. All the characters are grouped by the story round the central figure of the besieged city, the incidents of the _peripeteia_ or plot are interwoven with that event and with each other, and--if it be not presumption to use such a word--the _Epos_ is complete. The critics, I have no doubt, will find abundant faults; and the rest I commit to their tender mercies.