batteries, and an enormous array of small craft, all chained to each other and to the ground, and protected by the Crown-batteries, mounting eighty-eight guns, and the fortifications of the isle of Amack.  The battle lasted for four hours, and ended in a signal victory.  Some few schooners and bomb-vessels fled early, and escaped:  the whole Danish fleet besides were sunk, burnt, or taken.  The Prince Regent, to save the capital from destruction, was compelled to enter into a negotiation, which ended in the abandonment of the French alliance by Denmark.  Lord Nelson then reconnoitred Stockholm; but, being unwilling to inflict unnecessary suffering, did not injure the city, on discovering that the Swedish fleet had already put to sea.  Meantime, news arrived that Paul had been assassinated in his palace at St. Petersburg; and that the policy which he had adopted, to the displeasure of the Russian nobility, was likely to find no favour with his successor.  The moving spirit of the northern confederacy was, in effect, no more, and a brief negotiation ended in its total disrupture.[41]

In the same month of March the British arms were crowned with a more pleasing triumph in a more distant region.  From the time when Buonaparte landed in Egypt, the occupation of that country by a French army, and its possible consequences to our empire in the East, had formed a subject of anxious solicitude in the cabinet of St. James’s; and the means for attacking the army which Napoleon had entrusted to Kleber, had, at length, been combined and set in motion, in opposition to the sentiments both of the King and Mr. Pitt, by the bold spirit of Lord Melville, then at the head of the Indian Board of Control.  The fleet of Lord Keith, carrying Sir Ralph Abercrombie and his army, were already in possession of Malta; another army of 7000, composed partly of English troops and partly of sepoys, had been dispatched from India, and approached Egypt by the way of the Red Sea; and, lastly, the Ottoman Porte was prepared to co-operate with General Abercrombie, whenever he should effect a landing in the neighbourhood of Alexandria.  That event occurred on the 13th of March, the British troops disembarking in the face of the French, who were very strongly posted; and, at length, driving them from the shore.  On the 21st a general engagement took place in front of Alexandria; and Sir Ralph Abercrombie fell, mortally wounded, in the moment of victory.  General Hutchinson (afterwards Earl of Donoughmore), on whom the command devolved, pursued the advantage.  Kleber, who by his excellent administration had earned the title of the Just Sultan, had been assassinated by an obscure fanatic on the same day when Dessaix died gloriously at Marengo; and Menou, who succeeded to the command of the French army in Egypt, was found wholly incapable of conducting either the civil or the military business of the colony to advantage.  He shut himself up in Alexandria with the relics of