d him to face a responsibility from which weaker men would have
shrunk. "I conceive," he answered, "that the honour and interest of our
country require that we should hold our ground here as long as possible;
and, please God, I will maintain it as long as I can." By the addition
of Portuguese troops who had been trained under British officers, his
army was now raised to fifty thousand men; and though his inferiority in
force compelled him to look on while Massena reduced the frontier
fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, he inflicted on him a heavy
check at the heights of Busaco, and finally fell back in October 1810 on
three lines of defence which he had secretly constructed at Torres
Vedras, along a chain of mountain, heights crowned with redoubts and
bristling with cannon. The position was impregnable: and able and
stubborn as Massena was he found himself forced after a month's
fruitless efforts to fall back in a masterly retreat; but so terrible
were the privations of the French army in passing again through the
wasted country that it was only with forty thousand men that he reached
Ciudad Rodrigo in the spring of 1811. Reinforced by fresh troops,
Massena turned fiercely to the relief of Almeida, which Wellington had
besieged. Two days' bloody and obstinate fighting however, in May 1811,
failed to drive the English army from its position at Fuentes d'Onore,
and the Marshal fell back on Salamanca and relinquished his effort to
drive Wellington from Portugal. But great as was the effect of Torres
Vedras in restoring the spirit of the English people, and in reviving
throughout Europe the hope of resistance to the tyranny of Napoleon, its
immediate result was little save the deliverance of Portugal. If Massena
had failed, his colleagues had succeeded in their enterprises; the
French were now masters of all Spain save Cadiz and the eastern
provinces, and even the east coast was reduced in 1811 by the vigour of
General Suchet.

[Sidenote: The Quarrel with America.]

While England thus failed to rescue Spain from the aggression of
Napoleon, she was suddenly brought face to face with the result of her
own aggression in America. The repeal of the Non-Intercourse Act in 1810
had in effect been a triumph for Britain: but the triumph forced
Napoleon's hand. As yet all he had done by his attack on neutral rights
had been to drive the United States practically to join England against
him. To revenge himself by war with them