ator for
negotiating an arrangement. Bonaparte declared that he had not come to
ravage the country, or to wrest it from its ruler, but merely to deliver
it from the domination of the Mamluks, and to revenge the outrages which
they had committed against France. He promised that the authorities of
the country should be upheld; that the ceremonies of religion should
continue to be performed as before; that property should be respected.
On these conditions, the resistance ceased, and the French were masters
of Alexandria. Meanwhile, the remainder of the army had landed. It
was immediately necessary to decide where to place the squadron
safely--whether in the harbour or in one of the neighbouring roads;--to
form at Alexandria an administration adapted to the manners of the
country; and also to devise a plan of invasion in order to gain
possession of Egypt.

At this period the population of Egypt was, like the towns that covered
it, a mixture of the wrecks of several nations,--Kopts, the survivors of
the ancient inhabitants of the land; Arabs, who conquered Egypt from
the Kopts; and Turks, the conquerors of the Arabs. On the arrival of
the French, the Kopts amounted at most to two hundred thousand:
poor, despised, brutalised, they had devoted themselves, like all the
proscribed classes, to the most ignoble occupations. The Arabs formed
almost the entire mass of the population. Their condition was infinitely
varied: some were of high birth, carrying back their pedigree to
Muhammed himself; and some were landed proprietors, possessing traces
of Arabian knowledge, and combining with nobility the functions of the
priesthood and the magistracy, who, under the title of sheikhs, were the
real aristocracy of Egypt.

[Illustration: 091.jpg THE PROPHET MUHAMMED]

The original of the illustration (upon the opposite page) is
to be seen in a finely illuminated MS. of the ninth century,
A. D., preserved in the India Office, London. The picture is
of peculiar interest, being the only known portrait of
Muhammed, who is evidently represented as receiving the
divine command to propagate Muhammedanism.

In the divans, they represented the country, when its tyrants wished
to address themselves to it; in the mosques, they formed a kind of
university, in which they taught the religion and the morality of the
Koran, and a little philosophy and jurisprudence. The great mosque of
Jemil-Azar constituted the foremost