previous to its declaration of war against the Emperor of the French, are stated at length in the manifesto of the Court of Portugal, dated Rio Janeiro, May 1st, 1808; and to that the reader may he referred:  but upon this subject I will beg leave to lay before him, the following extract from the Address of the supreme Junta of Seville to the Portugueze nation, dated May 30th, 1808.  ’PORTUGUESE,—­Your lot is, perhaps, the hardest ever endured by any people on the earth.  Your princes were compelled to fly from you, and the events in Spain have furnished an irrefragable proof of the absolute necessity of that measure.—­You were ordered not to defend yourselves, and you did not defend yourselves.  Junot offered to make you happy, and your happiness has consisted in being treated with greater cruelty than the most ferocious conquerors inflict on the people whom they have subdued by force of arms and after the most obstinate resistance.  You have been despoiled of your princes, your laws, your usages, your customs, your property, your liberty, even your lives, and your holy religion, which your enemies never have respected, however they may, according to their custom, have promised to protect it, and however they may affect and pretend to have any sense of it themselves.  Your nobility has been annihilated,—­its property confiscated in punishment of its fidelity and loyalty.  You have been basely dragged to foreign countries, and compelled to prostrate yourselves at the feet of the man who is the author of all your calamities, and who, by the most horrible perfidy, has usurped your government, and rules you with a sceptre of iron.  Even now your troops have left your borders, and are travelling in chains to die in the defence of him who has oppressed you; by which means his deep malignity may accomplish his purpose,—­by destroying those who should constitute your strength, and by rendering their lives subservient to his triumphs, and to the savage glory to which he aspires.—­Spain beheld your slavery, and the horrible evils which followed it, with mingled sensations of grief and despair.  You are her brother, and she panted to fly to your assistance.  But certain Chiefs, and a Government either weak or corrupt, kept her in chains, and were preparing the means by which the ruin of our king, our laws, our independence, our liberty, our lives, and even the holy religion in which we are united, might accompany your’s,—­by which a barbarous people might consummate their own triumph, and accomplish the slavery of every nation in Europe:—­our loyalty, our honour, our justice, could not submit to such flagrant atrocity!  We have broken our chains,—­let us then to action.’  But the story of Portugueze sufferings shall be told by Junot himself; who, in his proclamation to the people of Portugal (dated Palace of Lisbon, June 26,) thus speaks to them:  ’You have earnestly entreated of him a king, who, aided by the omnipotence of that great monarch, might raise up again your unfortunate