second division reached its destination the first phase of the war was over. Vimeira had been fought, the Convention of Cintra signed, and the three generals, Wellesley, Burrard, and Dalrymple, had gone home to appear before a court of inquiry to answer for the abortive result of the campaign. By this strange incident Sir John Moore became Commander-in-Chief of the English forces in Spain, in spite of the elaborate manoeuvres of those members of the British Cabinet who had so laboriously planned to keep him out of that position, and in the autumn of the year the march from Lisbon, which was to end at Corunna, began. In this long and eventful march the three brothers Napier, Charles, George, and William, all young soldiers thirsting for military distinction, came together for the first time since they had quitted the Eagle's Nest at Celbridge. We must glance for a moment at the field of combat which was now opening before these young soldiers. In the month of October, 1808, when Moore began his march from Lisbon, the Spanish armies, some seven in number, formed a great curved line of which the Somo Sierra between Madrid and the Pyrenees was the centre, while the flanks touched the Mediterranean on one side and the Bay of Biscay on the other. Within this curve, with its back to the Pyrenees and its face to the Ebro, lay the French army. Napoleon was still engaged far away in France with his harbours, canals, roads, and codes of law; but his soldiers were already moving from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, and a storm little dreamt of by either the English or the Spaniards was about to burst from the defiles of these snow-capped mountains. The objective of Sir John Moore's march was the north of Spain. So vague was the knowledge possessed by the British Government of the actual condition of affairs in the Peninsula and of the power of the French Emperor that the wildest anticipations of speedy success were indulged in by the English Government at this time, and it was confidently expected that Moore's junction with the Spanish armies would be the prelude to the passage of the Pyrenees by the combined forces and the conquest of France. We have already indicated the position of these Spanish armies in this month of October, 1808. At the close of the month Moore was well on his march into Spain. Napoleon was still in Paris; but all was now ready for the swoop. Early in November he passed the Pyrenees, struck right and left with resistless force upon the Spanish armies on his flanks--first annihilating Blake and Romana at Gamoual and Espinosa, then destroying Palafox and Castanos at Tudela; and finally, breaking with his cavalry the Spanish centre, he forced the gorges of the Somo Sierra, and appeared before the gates of Madrid before the English army had time to concentrate at Salamanca. Never was victory so complete. To fall back upon Lisbon was now the duty and the desire of Sir John Moore,