, and gave the
preponderance to England. The agents of the British government succeeded
in rousing Turkey to arms, to recover a province which the Mamelukes had
wrested from her, before Napoleon took it from the Mamelukes. Russia also,
with her barbaric legions, was roused by the eloquence of England, to rush
upon the French Republic in this day of disaster. Her troops crowded down
from the north to ally themselves with the turbaned Turk, for the
extermination of the French in Egypt. Old enmities were forgotten, as
Christians and Mussulmans grasped hands in friendship, forgetting all
other animosities in their common hatred and dread of Republicanism. The
Russian fleet crowded down from the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus, to
the Golden Horn, where, amidst the thunders of artillery, and the
acclamations of the hundreds of thousands who throng the streets of
Constantinople, Pera, and Scutari, it was received into the embrace of the
Turkish squadron. It was indeed a gorgeous spectacle as, beneath the
unclouded splendor of a September sun, this majestic armament swept
through the beautiful scenery of the Hellespont. The shores of Europe and
Asia, separated by this classic strait, were lined with admiring
spectators, as the crescent and the cross, in friendly blending, fluttered
together in the breeze. The combined squadron emerged into the
Mediterranean, to co-operate with the victorious fleet of England, which
was now the undisputed mistress of the sea. Religious animosities the most
inveterate, and national antipathies the most violent were reconciled by
the pressure of a still stronger hostility to those principles of popular
liberty which threatened to overthrow the despotism both of the Sultan and
the Czar. The Grand Seignor had assembled an army of twenty thousand men
at Rhodes. They were to be conveyed by the combined fleet to the shores of
Egypt, and there effect a landing under cover of its guns. Another vast
army was assembled in Syria, to march down upon the French by way of the
desert, and attack them simultaneously with the forces sent by the fleet.
England, and the emissaries of the Bourbons, with vast sums of money
accumulated from the European monarchies, were actively co-operating upon
the Syrian coast, by landing munitions of war, and by supplying able
military engineers. The British Government was also accumulating a vast
army in India, to be conveyed by transports up the Red Sea, and to fall
upon the Fre