The Arabs and the Turks, excellent soldiers behind a wall, kept up a steady fire, but the French mounted with ladders and got over the old wall.  Kleber was the first who fell, seriously wounded on the forehead.  The Arabs were driven from ruin to ruin, as far as the new town, and the combat seemed likely to be continued from street to street, and to become sanguinary, when a Turkish captain served as a mediator 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 learned and religious body in the East.  Next to these grandees came the smaller landholders, composing