character of robbers.  Colonel Napier, it is true, has contradicted himself with regard to the value of the guerillas; alternately ridiculing then as an imbecile force, and yet accrediting them as neutralizers of regular armies, to an enormous amount.  But can a more deplorable record be needed of Spanish ignominy, than that a nation, once the leader of Europe as to infantry and military skill, should, by mere default of an intrepid gentry, be thrown upon the necessity of a brigand force?  Equally abject was the state of Portugal.  Let any man read the French general Foy’s account of the circumstances under which Junot’s van, separated by some days’ march from the rest of the army, entered Lisbon in 1807.  The rural population of Portugal, in most provinces, is a fine athletic race; and foreigners take a false estimate of this race, from the depraved mob of Lisbon.  This capital, however, at that time, contained 60,000 fighting men, a powerful fortress, and ships in the river.  Yet did Junot make his entry with 6000 of the poorest troops, in a physical sense, that Europe could show.  Foy admits, that the majority were poor starveling boys, who could scarcely hold their muskets from cold and continual wet, hurried by forced marches, ill fed, desponding, and almost ripe for the hospital.  Vast crowds had assembled to see the entry.  “What!” exclaimed the Portuguese, “are these little drowned rats the elite of Napoleon’s armies?” Inevitably, the very basest of nations, would, on such an invitation to resistance, have risen that same night, whilst the poor, childish, advanced guard was already beaten to their hands.  The French officers apprehended such an attempt, but nothing happened; the faint-hearted people threw away this golden opportunity, never to be retrieved.  And why?  Because they had no gentry to lead, to rally, or to counsel them.  The populace in both countries, though miserably deteriorated by the long defect of an aristocracy whom they could respect, were still sound at the heart; they felt the whole sorrow of their own degradation; and that they would have fought, was soon proved in the case of the Portuguese, when we lent them officers and training; as it was proved also thirty years afterwards in the case of the Spaniards, when Don Carlos, in a time of general peace, obtained good officers from every part of Europe.  Each country was forced into redeeming itself by the overflowing upon it of a foreign gentry.  And yet, even at the moment of profoundest degradation, such was the maniacal vanity still prevailing amongst the Spaniards, that at one time the Supreme Junta forwarded the following proposal to the British Government:—­Men they had; their own independence of foreign aid, in that sense, they had always asserted; money it was, and not armies, which they needed; and they now proposed an arrangement, by which the Spanish armies, as so notoriously the heroes of Europe, should be rendered universally disposable for the task of facing the French