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suspended from the flagstaffs of the batteries, and from the masts and yards of the ships, and were reflected in the waters of the Propontis, the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus. The whole Othoman encampment was resplendent with the blaze of this illumination. deep silence prevailed during the whole night, except when the musical cadence of the solemn chant of a thousand voices calling the true believers to prayers reminded the Greeks of the immense numbers and strict discipline of the host which was waiting eagerly for the signal of attack.

On the 29th May [1453], long before the earliest dawn, the assault commenced both by land and sea. Column after column marched forward, and took up their ground before the portions of the wall they were ordered to assail. The galleys, fitted with towers and scalingplatforms, protected by the guns on the bridge, advanced against the fortifications of the port. But the principal attack was directed against the breach at the gate of St Romanos, where two flanking towers had fallen into the ditch and opened a passage into the interior of the city. The gate of Charsias and the quarter of Blachern were also assailed by chosen regiments of janissaries in overwhelming numbers. The attack was made with daring courage, but for more than two hours every point was successfully defended. In the port the contest appeared favourable to the besieged; and even on the land side their valour was for some time successful. But fresh columns followed one another in an incessant stream, and if one battalion fell back to reform its ranks, another rushed forward to take its place and renew the assault. The defenders were at last fatigued by their exertions, and their scanty numbers were weakened by wounds and death. Unfortunately, Giustiniani, the protostrator or marshal of the army, and the ablest officer in the place, received a wound which compelled him to retire on board his ship to have it dressed. Until that moment he and the emperor had defended the great breach with advantage, but after his retreat Sagan Pasha, observing that the energy of the defenders was relaxed, excited the bravest of the janissaries to mount to the assault. A chosen company led by Hassan of Ulubad (Lopadion), a man of gigantic frame, first crossed the ruins of the wall, and their leader gained the summit of the dilapidated tower which flanked the breach. The defenders made a desperate resistance. Hassan and many of his followers were slain, but the janissaries had secured the vantage-ground, and fresh troops pouring in to their aid, they surrounded the defenders of the breach. The emperor fell amidst a heap of slain, and a column of janissaries rushed into Constantinople over his lifeless body.

About the same time another corps of the Othomans forced an entrance into the city at the Gate Kerkos, which had been left almost without defence, for the besieged were not sufficiently numerous to guard the whole line of the fortifications, and their best troops were drawn to the points where the attacks were fiercest. The corps that forced the Gate Kerkos took the defenders of the Gate Charsias in the rear, and overpowered all resistance in the quarter of Blachern.

Several gates were then thrown open, and the victorious army entered Constantinople at several points. The cry that the enemy had stormed the walls preceded their march. Senators, priests, monks, and nuns; men, women, and children, all rushed to seek safety in St Sophia's.

A prediction current among the Greeks flattered them with the vain hope that an angel would descend from heaven and destroy the Mohammedans in order to reveal the extent of God's love for the orthodox. St Sophia's, which for some time they had forsaken as a spot profaned by the emperor's attempt at a union of the Christian world, was again revered as the sanctuary of orthodoxy, and was crowded with the flower of the Greek nation, confident of a miraculous interposition in favour of their national pride and ecclesiastical prejudices.

The besiegers, when they first entered the city, fearing lest they might encounter serious resistance in the narrow streets, put every soul they encountered to the sword. But as soon as they were fully aware of the impossibility of any further opposition, they began to make prisoners. At length they reached St Sophia's, and rushed into that magnificent temple, which could with ease contain about twenty thousand persons. The men, women, and children who had sought safety in the church were divided among the soldiers as slaves, without any reference to their rank or respect for their ties of blood, and hurried off to the camp, or placed under the guard of comrades, who formed joint alliances for the security of their plunder. The ecclesiastical ornaments and church-plate were poor indeed when compared with the immense riches of the Byzantine cathedral in the time of the Crusaders; but whatever was movable was divided among the soldiers with such celerity that the mighty temple soon presented few traces of having been a Christian church. The sack of this great cathedral was marked by many deeds of rapacity and cruelty, but it was not stained by the infamous orgies and wanton insults with which the Crusaders had disgraced their victory in 1204.

While one division of the victorious army was engaged in plundering the southern side of the city, from the Gate of St Romanos to the Church of St Sophia, another, turning to the port, made itself master of the warehouses that were filled with merchandise, and surrounded the Greek troops under the Grand-Duke Notaras. The Greeks were easily subdued, and Notaras surrendered himself a prisoner.

About midday the Turks were in possession of the whole city, and Mohammed II. entered his new capital at the Gate of St Romanos, riding triumphantly past the body of the Emperor Constantine, which lay concealed among the slain in the breach he had defended. The sultan rode straight to the Church of St Sophia, where he gave the necessary orders for the preservation of all the public buildings. Even during the license of the sack, the severe education and grave character of the Othomans exerted a powerful influence on their conduct, and on this occasion there was no example of the wanton destruction and wilful conflagrations that had signalised the Latin conquest. To convince the Greeks that their orthodox empire was extinct, Mohammed ordered a moolah to ascend the bema and address a sermon to the Mussulmans, announcing that St Sophia was now a mosque set apart for the prayers of the true believers. To put an end to all doubts concerning the death of the emperor, he ordered the body of Constantine to be sought amongst the slain, and after it had been identified by the Grand-Duke Notaras, the head was exposed to the inhabitants of the capital, from whence it was afterwards sent as a trophy to be seen by the Greeks of the principal cities in the Othoman Empire.

The body was interred with due ceremony at a spot which is still pointed out, and where the Othoman sultans keep alive a striking memorial of their ancestor's victory by maintaining a lamp constantly burning over the remains of the last Christian emperor of Constantinople.

Colonel William Mure (1799-1860) of Caldwell in Ayrshire, who was educated at Westminster, Edinburgh, and Bonn, represented Renfrewshire in Parliament, commanded in the militia, and was Lord Rector of Glasgow University, was the author of a learned work, A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece (5 vols. 1850-57, unfinished). He travelled in Greece, and in the Journal of his tour (1842) engaged in the Homeric controversy, especially as to the localities of the Odyssey. A competent scholar devoted to Greek literature for twenty years, he brought to his Critical History political opinions directly opposite to those of Mr Grote, maintained that both Iliad and Odyssey were originally composed substantially as we still have them, and argued strenuously for the unity and authenticity of the Homeric poems.

It is probable that, like most other great painters of human nature, Homer was indebted to previous tradition for the original sketches of his principal heroes. These sketches, however, could have been little more than outlines, which, as worked up into the finished portraits of the Iliad and Odyssey, must rank as his own genuine productions. In every branch of imitative art this faculty of representing to the life the moral phenomena of our nature in their varied phases of virtue, vice, weakness, or eccentricity is the highest and rarest attribute of genius, and rarest of all as exercised by Homer through the medium of dramatic action, where the characters are never formally described, but made to develop themselves by their own language and conduct. It is this among his many great qualities which chiefly raises Homer above all other poets of his own class; nor, with the single exception perhaps of the great English dramatist, has any poet ever produced so numerous and spirited a variety of original characters, of different ages, ranks, and sexes. Still more peculiar to himself than their variety is the unity of thought, feeling, and expression, often of minute phraseology, with which they are individually sustained, and yet without an appearance of effort on the part of their author. Each describes himself spontaneously when brought on the scene, just as the automata of Vulcan in the Odyssey, though indebted to the divine artist for the mechanism on which they move, appear to perform their functions by their own unaided powers. That any two or more poets should simultaneously have conceived such a character as Achilles is next to impossible. Still less credible is it that the different parts of the Iliad, where the hero successively appears as the same sublime ideal being, under the influence of the same combination of virtues, failings, and passions-thinking, speaking, acting, and suffering according to the same single type of heroic grandeur-can be the production of more than a single mind. Such evidence is perhaps even stronger in the case of the less prominent actors, in so far as it is less possible that different artists should simultaneously agree

in their portraits of mere subordinate incidental personages than of heroes whose renown may have rendered their characters a species of public property. Two poets of the Elizabethan age might without any concert have harmonised to a great extent in their portrait of Henry V.; but that the correspondence should have extended to the imaginary companions of his youththe Falstaffs, Pistols, Bardolphs, Quicklys-were incredible. But the nicest shades of peculiarity in the inferior actors of the Iliad and Odyssey are conceived and maintained in the same spirit of distinction as in Achilles or Hector.

John Colin Dunlop (c. 1785-1842), son of a poetical Lord Provost of Glasgow (see Vol. II. p. 808), studied there and at Edinburgh for the Scottish Bar, and from 1816 till his death was Sheriff of Renfrewshire. His History of Fiction ... from the Earliest Greek Romances till the Novels of the Present Age, published in 1814, could not from the nature of the case be a perfect work, nor does it stand on the higher level of literary criticism. But, improved in a second edition (3 vols. 1816), it was in the German annotated translation (1851) described as the only work of its kind; and it contains a vast amount of sensible, if at times somewhat superficial, information. He wrote also a History of Roman Literature (3 vols. 1823-28), Memoirs of Spain from 1621 to 1700 (2 vols. 1834), and a volume of translations from the Latin Anthology (1838).

Sir William Francis Patrick Napier (1785-1860) was a descendant of Napier of Merchiston, brother of Sir Charles the conqueror of Sindh, and cousin of Admiral Sir Charles Napier, who bombarded Acre and commanded in the Baltic in the war against Russia in 1854. Born at Celbridge, County Kildare, the son of Colonel the Hon. George Napier and his second wife, Lady Sarah Bunbury (daughter of the Duke of Richmond and at one time the object of a romantic passion on the part of the young George III.), he entered the army at fifteen, and as an officer in the famous Light Division greatly distinguished himself in the Peninsular war, of which he was to write the splendid record, The History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France from the year 1807 to the year 1814 (1828-40). Napier, unlike most earlier British authors, showed the same admiration for French as for English heroism; his proof-sheets were read by Marshal Soult. The book immediately gave Napier high rank amongst English writers and historians; superseded Southey's and other works on the same subject; was translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German; and took a permanent place as an English classic. Mr Oman, in rewriting the history of the Peninsular war (1902), fully recognises the merits of 'the immortal six volumes of the grand old soldier,' but insists, with evidence, that in this all-important contemporary narrative the personal element counts for too much, and that Napier's sympathies and

enmities have coloured the whole work. He was a bitter enemy of the Tories of his own day, and is not a trustworthy guide either on the English or Spanish politics of the time. He was strongly prejudiced against Canning and Castlereagh, and cherished the hallucination that Bonaparte was a beneficent character thwarted in his designs for the regeneration of Europe by the obstinate and narrow-minded opposition of the British Government.' He is always unfair to the Spaniards, and invariably minimises their successes and exaggerates their defeats. But as a narrator of the incidents of war he is unrivalled: no one who has ever read them can forget his soul-stirring descriptions of the charge of the Fusilier brigade at Albuera, of the assault on the great breach at Badajos, or the storming of Soult's position on the Rhune. These and a hundred other eloquent passages will survive for ever as masterpieces of vigorous English prose.' Napier, who was a generous and hot-tempered man, a keen controversialist, an accomplished painter and sculptor, wrote, beside his magnum opus, an account of The Conquest of Scinde (1845), a somewhat too eulogistic and one-sided Life and Opinions of Sir Charles Napier (1857), and a history of his brother's administration of Sindh.

Albuera.

Houghton's regiments reached the height under a heavy cannonade, and the Twenty-ninth, after breaking through the fugitive Spaniards, was charged in flank by the French lancers; yet two companies, wheeling to the right, foiled this attack with a sharp fire, and then the third brigade of the second division came up on the left, and the Spanish troops under Zayas and Ballesteros at last moved forward. Hartman's artillery was now in full play, and the enemy's infantry recoiled, but soon recovering, renewed the fight with greater violence than before. The cannon on both sides discharged showers of grape at half range; the peals of musketry were incessant, often within pistol-shot; yet the close formation of the French embarrassed their battle, and the British line would not yield them an inch of ground or a moment of time to open their ranks. Their fighting was, however, fierce and dangerous. Stewart was twice wounded, Colonel Duckworth was slain, and the intrepid Houghton, having received many wounds without shrinking, fell and died in the very act of cheering on his men. Still the struggle continued with unabated fury. Colonel Inglis, twentytwo officers, and more than four hundred men, out of five hundred and seventy who had mounted the hill, fell in the Fifty-seventh alone; the other regiments were scarcely better off, not one-third were standing in any: ammunition failed, and as the English fire slackened a French column was established in advance upon the right flank. The play of the guns checked them a moment, but in this dreadful crisis Beresford wavered! Destruction stared him in the face, his personal resources were exhausted, and the unhappy thought of a retreat rose in his agitated mind. He had before brought Hamilton's Portuguese into a situation to cover a retrograde movement; he now sent Alten orders to abandon the bridge and village of Albuera, and to take, with his Germans

and the Portuguese artillery, a position to cover a retreat by the Valverde road. But while the commander was thus preparing to resign the contest, Colonel Hardinge had urged Cole to advance with the fourth division; and then riding to the third brigade of the second division, which, under the command of Colonel Abercrombie, had hitherto been only slightly engaged, directed him also to push forward into the fight. The die was thus cast; Beresford acquiesced, Alten received orders to retake the village, and this terrible battle was continued.

At

The fourth division was composed of two brigades : one of Portuguese under General Harvey; the other, under Sir William Myers, consisting of the Seventh and Twenty-third Regiments, was called the fusileer brigade : Harvey's Portuguese were immediately pushed in between Lumley's dragoons and the hill, where they were charged by some French cavalry, whom they beat off, and meantime Cole led his fusileers up the contested height. this time six guns were in the enemy's possession, the whole of Werle's reserves were coming forward to reinforce the front column of the French, the remnant of Houghton's brigade could no longer maintain its ground, the field was heaped with carcasses, the lancers were riding furiously about the captured artillery on the upper parts of the hill, and behind all, Hamilton's Portuguese and Alten's Germans, now withdrawing from the bridge, seemed to be in full retreat. Soon, however, Cole's fusileers, flanked by a battalion of the Lusitanian legion under Colonel Hawkshawe, mounted the hill, drove off the lancers, recovered five of the captured guns and one colour, and appeared on the right of Houghton's brigade, precisely as Abercrombie passed it on the left.

Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude, startled the enemy's masses, which were increasing and pressing onwards as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and then vomiting forth a storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through the British ranks. Myers was killed; Cole and the three colonels, Ellis, Blakeney, and Hawkshawe, fell wounded; and the fusileer battalions, struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans break from the crowded columns and sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front, their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as slowly and with a horrid carnage it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the hill. In vain did the French reserves mix with the struggling multitude to sustain the fight; their efforts only increased the irremediable confusion, and the mighty mass, breaking off like

a loosened cliff, went headlong down the steep the rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill !

Badajos.

All this time the tumult at the breaches was such as if the very earth had been rent asunder and its central fires bursting upwards uncontrolled. The two divisions had reached the glacis just as the firing at the castle commenced, and the flash of a single musket discharged from the covered way as a signal showed them that the French were ready; yet no stir was heard and darkness covered the breaches. Some hay-packs were thrown, some ladders placed, and the forlorn hopes and stormingparties of the light division, five hundred in all, descended into the ditch without opposition; but then a bright flame shooting upwards displayed all the terrors of the scene. The ramparts, crowded with dark figures and glittering arms, were on one side; on the other the red columns of the British, deep and broad, were coming on like streams of burning lava; it was the touch of the magician's wand, for a crash of thunder followed, and with incredible violence the storming-parties were dashed to pieces by the explosion of hundreds of shells and powder-barrels.

For an instant the light division stood on the brink of the ditch amazed at the terrific sight, but then, with a shout that matched even the sound of the explosion, the men flew down the ladders, or, disdaining their aid, leaped reckless of the depth into the gulf below; and at the same moment, amidst a blaze of musketry that dazzled the eyes, the fourth division came running in and descended with a like fury. There were only five ladders for the two columns, which were close together, and a deep cut made in the bottom of the ditch as far as the counter-guard of the Trinidad was filled with water from the inundation; into that watery snare the head of the fourth division fell, and it is said above a hundred of the fusileers, the men of Albuera, were there smothered. Those who followed checked not, but, as if such a disaster had been expected, turned to the left and thus came upon the face of the unfinished ravelin, which, being rough and broken, was mistaken for the breach and instantly covered with men; yet a wide and deep chasm was still between them and the ramparts, from whence came a deadly fire wasting their ranks. Thus baffled, they also commenced a rapid discharge of musketry, and disorder ensued; for the men of the light division, whose conducting engineer had been disabled early, and whose flank was confined by an unfinished ditch intended to cut off the bastion of Santa Maria, rushed towards the breaches of the curtain and the Trinidad, which were indeed before them, but which the fourth division had been destined to storm. Great was the confusion, for the ravelin was quite crowded with men of both divisions, and while some continued to fire, others jumped down and ran towards the breach; many also passed between the ravelin and the counter-guard of the Trinidad; the two divisions got mixed; the reserves, which should have remained at the quarries, also came pouring in until the ditch was quite filled, the rear still crowding forward and all cheering vehemently. The enemy's shouts also were loud and terrible, and the bursting of shells and of grenades, the roaring of guns from the flanks, answered

by the iron howitzers from the battery of the parallel, the heavy roll and horrid explosion of the powder-barrels, the whizzing flight of the blazing splinters, the loud exhortations of the officers, and the continual clatter of the muskets made a maddening din.

Now a multitude bounded up the great breach as if driven by a whirlwind, but across the top glittered a range of sword-blades, sharp-pointed, keen-edged on both sides, and firmly fixed in ponderous beams chained together and set deep in the ruins; and for ten feet in front the ascent was covered with loose planks studded with sharp iron points, on which feet being set, the planks moved, and the unhappy soldiers, falling forward on the spikes, rolled down upon the ranks behind. Then the Frenchmen, shouting at the success of their stratagem and leaping forward, plied their shot with terrible rapidity, for every man had several muskets, and each musket, in addition to its ordinary charge, contained a small cylinder of wood stuck full of wooden slugs, which scattered like hail when they were discharged. Once and again the assailants rushed up the breaches, but always the sword-blades, immovable and impassable, stopped their charge, and the hissing shells and thundering powder-barrels exploded unceasingly. Hundreds of men had fallen; hundreds more were dropping; still the heroic officers called aloud for new trials, and, sometimes followed by many, sometimes by a few, ascended the ruins; and so furious were the men themselves that in one of these charges the rear strove to push the foremost on to the sword-blades, willing even to make a bridge of their writhing bodies, but the others frustrated the attempt by dropping down; and men fell so far from the shot that it was hard to know who went down voluntarily and who were stricken, and many stooped unhurt that never rose again. Vain also would it have been to break through the sword-blades, for the trench and parapet behind the breach were finished, and the assailants, crowded into even a narrower space than the ditch was, would still have been separated from their enemies and the slaughter would have continued.

At the beginning of this dreadful conflict Andrew Barnard had with prodigious efforts separated his division from the other and preserved some degree of military array; but now the tumult was such that no command could be heard distinctly except by those close at hand, and the mutilated carcasses heaped on each other, and the wounded struggling to avoid being trampled upon, broke the formations: order was impossible! Officers of all ranks, followed more or less numerously by the men, were seen to start out as if struck by sudden madness and rush into the breach, which, yawning and glittering with steel, seemed like the mouth of a huge dragon belching forth smoke and flame. In one of these attempts Colonel Macleod of the Forty-third, a young man whose feeble body would have been quite unfit for war if it had not been sustained by an unconquerable spirit, was killed; wherever his voice was heard his soldiers had gathered, and with such a strong resolution did he lead them up the fatal ruins that when one behind him in falling plunged a bayonet into his back he complained not, but, continuing his course, was shot dead within a yard of the sword-blades. Yet there was no want of gallant leaders or desperate followers until two hours passed in these vain efforts had convinced the troops the breach of the Trinidad was impregnable; and as the opening in the curtain, although

less strong, was retired and the approach to it impeded by deep holes and cuts made in the ditch, the soldiers did not much notice it after the partial failure of one attack which had been made early. Gathering in dark groups and leaning on their muskets, they looked up with sullen desperation at the Trinidad, while the enemy, stepping out on the ramparts and aiming their shots by the light of the fire-balls which they threw over, asked as their victims fell, why they did not come into Badajos.'

In this dreadful situation, while the dead were lying in heaps and others continually falling, the wounded crawling about to get some shelter from the merciless shower above, and withal a sickening stench from the burnt flesh of the slain, Captain Nicholas of the engineers was observed by Lieutenant Shaw of the Forty-third making incredible efforts to force his way with a few men into the Santa Maria bastion. Shaw immediately collected fifty soldiers of all regiments and joined him; and although there was a deep cut along the foot of that breach also, it was instantly passed, and these two young officers led their gallant band with a rush up the ruins; but when they had gained two-thirds of the ascent a concentrated fire of musketry and grape dashed nearly the whole dead to the earth. Nicholas was mortally wounded, and the intrepid Shaw stood alone! With inexpressible coolness he looked at his watch, and saying it was too late to carry the breaches, rejoined the masses at the other attack. After this no further effort was made at any point, and the troops remained passive but unflinching beneath the enemy's shot, which streamed without intermission; for of the riflemen on the glacis, many, leaping early into the ditch, had joined in the assault, and the rest, raked by a cross fire of grape from the distant bastions, baffled in their aim by the smoke and flames from the explosions, and, too few in number, entirely failed to quell the French musketry.

About midnight, when two thousand brave men had fallen, Wellington, who was on a height close to the quarries, ordered the remainder to retire and re-form for a second assault; he had heard the castle was taken, but, thinking the enemy would still resist in the town, was resolved to assail the breaches again. This retreat from the ditch was not effected without further carnage and confusion; the French fire never slackened; a cry arose that the enemy was making a sally from the distant flanks, and there was a rush towards the ladders. Then the groans and lamentations of the wounded who could not move and expected to be slain increased, and many officers who had not heard of the order endeavoured to stop the soldiers from going back; some would even have removed the ladders, but were unable to break the crowd.

All this time Picton was lying close in the castle, and either from fear of risking the loss of a point which ensured the capture of the place, or that the egress was too difficult, made no attempt to drive away the enemy from the breaches. On the other side, however, the fifth division had commenced the false attack on the Pardaleras, and on the right of the Guadiana the Portuguese were sharply engaged at the bridge: thus the town was girdled with fire, for Walker's brigade, having passed on during the feint on the Pardaleras, was escalading the distant bastion of San Vincente. His troops had advanced along the banks of the river and reached the French guard-house at the barrier-gate undiscovered, the

ripple of the waters smothering the sound of their footsteps; but just then the explosion at the breaches took place; the moon shone out; the French sentinels, discovering the columns, fired; and the British soldiers, springing forward under a sharp musketry, began to hew down the wooden barrier at the covered way. The Portuguese, panic-stricken, threw down the scaling-ladders; the others snatched them up again, and forcing the barrier, jumped into the ditch; but the guiding engineer officer was killed, there was a cunette which embarrassed the column, and the ladders proved too short, for the walls were generally above thirty feet high. The fire of the enemy was deadly, a small mine was sprung beneath the soldiers' feet, beams of wood and live shells were rolled over on their heads, showers of grape from the flank swept the ditch, and man after man dropped dead from the ladders.

Fortunately some of the defenders had been called away to aid in recovering the castle; the ramparts were not entirely manned; and the assailants, discovering a corner of the bastion where the scarp was only twenty feet high, placed three ladders there under an embrasure which had no gun and was only stopped with a gabion. Some men got up with difficulty, for the ladders were still too short, and the first man who gained the top was pushed up by his comrades, and drew others after him until many had won the summit; and though the French shot heavily against them from both flanks and from a house in front, their numbers augmented rapidly, and half the Fourth Regiment entered the town itself to dislodge the French from the houses, while the others pushed along the rampart towards the breach, and by dint of hard fighting successively won three bastions.

In the last of these combats Walker, leaping forward sword in hand at the moment when one of the enemy's cannoneers was discharging a gun, was covered with so many wounds it was wonderful that he could survive; and some of the soldiers immediately after, perceiving a lighted match on the ground, cried out, 'A mine!' At that word, such is the power of imagination, those troops who had not been stopped by the strong barrier, the deep ditch, the high walls, and the deadly fire of the enemy, staggered back appalled by a chimera of their own raising; and in this disorder a French reserve under General Veillande drove on them with a firm and rapid charge, pitching some men over the walls, killing others outright, and cleansing the ramparts even to the San Vincente. There, however, Leith had placed Colonel Nugent with a battalion of the Thirty-eighth as a reserve, and when the French came up, shouting and slaying all before them, this battalion, two hundred strong, arose and with one close volley destroyed them; then the panic ceased, the soldiers rallied, and in compact order once more charged along the walls towards the breaches. But the French, although turned on both flanks and abandoned by fortune, did not yet yield. Meanwhile the portion of the Fourth Regiment which had entered the town was strangely situated. For the streets were empty and brilliantly illuminated and no person was seen, yet a low buzz and whispers were heard around, lattices were now and then gently opened, and from time to time shots were fired from underneath the doors of the houses by the Spaniards, while the troops, with bugles sounding, advanced towards the great square of the town. In their progress they captured several mules going with ammunition to the breaches; yet the square itself was as empty and silent as the streets, and the houses as bright with

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