A French army forthwith advanced on Rome; the Pope's functions as a temporal prince were terminated; he retired to the exile of Siena; and another of those feeble phantoms, which the Directory delighted to invest with glorious names, appeared under the title of "the Roman Republic." These outrages roused anew the indignation, the first, of all true lovers of freedom, the second, of the monarchs whose representatives were assembled at Rastadt, and the third, of the Catholic population throughout Europe.

England was not slow to take advantage of the unprincipled rashness of the Directory, and of the sentiments which it was fitted to inspire; and the result was a new coalition against France, in which the great power of Russia now, for the first time, took a part.

The French plenipotentiaries were suddenly ordered to quit Rastadt; and, within a few hours afterwards, they were murdered on their journey by banditti clad in the Austrian uniform, most assuredly not acting under orders from the Austrian government--and now commonly believed to have been set on by certain angry intriguers of the Luxembourg.
The King of Naples had, unfortunately for himself, a greater taste for arms than the nation he governed; and, justly concluding that the conquerors of Rome would make himself their next object, he rashly proclaimed war, ere the general measures of the coalition were arranged.
The arrival of Nelson in his harbour, bringing the news of the destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir, and the consequent isolation of Napoleon, gave him courage to strike a blow which the officers of his army were little likely to second.

The result of his hasty advance to the northwards was not a battle, but a flight: and though the Lazzaroni of Naples, rising in fury, held the capital for some days against the French, their defences were at length overcome; the king passed over to his Sicilian dominions; and another tributary of France was announced by the name of the Parthenopean Republic.
Far different success attended the better-considered movements by which the great powers of the new coalition re-opened the war.

The details of those bloody campaigns by which Holland and Belgium were for a moment rescued from the grasp of the Republic; Jourdan beaten beyond the Rhine by the Archduke Charles; and the north of Italy, the whole of Buonaparte's mighty conquests, recovered by the Austro-Russians under Suwarrow; as also of the ultimate reverses of the allies in the direction of Holland,--of the concentration of their forces in two great armies, one on the frontier of Switzerland, and another lower down on the Rhine, for the purpose of carrying the war by two inlets into the heart of France--and finally, of the masterly retreat of Macdonald, by which he succeeded in leading the army which had occupied Naples quite through Italy into Provence;--all these details belong rather to the general history of the period, than to the biography of Buonaparte.
Neither is it possible that we should here enter upon any minute account of the internal affairs of France during the period of his Egyptian and Syrian campaigns.