While these grievances and circumstances of suspicion agitated the English nation, the daily press, which alternately acts upon public opinion, and is reacted upon by it, was loud and vehement. The personal character of the chief consul was severely treated; his measures of self-aggrandisement arraigned, his aggressions on the liberty of France, of Italy, and especially of Switzerland, held up to open day; while every instance of petty vexation and oppression practised upon British commerce or British subjects, was quoted as expressing his deep resentment against the only country which possessed the will and the power to counteract his acquiring the universal dominion of Europe. There was at this period in Britain a large party of French Royalists, who, declining to return to France, or falling under the exceptions to the amnesty, regarded Buonaparte as their personal enemy, as well as the main obstacle to the restoration of the Bourbons, to which, but for him only, the people of France seemed otherwise more disposed than at any time since the commencement of the Revolution. These gentlemen found an able and active advocate of their cause in Monsieur Peltier, an emigrant, a determined royalist, and a man of that ready wit and vivacity of talent which is peculiarly calculated for periodical writing. He had opposed the democrats during the early days of the Revolution, by a publication termed the "Acts of the Apostles;"[1] in which he held up to ridicule and execration the actions, pretensions, and principles of their leaders, with such success as induced Brissot to assert, that he had done more harm to the Republican cause than all the allied armies. At the present crisis, he commenced the publication of a weekly paper in London, in the French language, called _L'Ambigu_. The decoration at the top of the sheet was a head of Buonaparte, placed on the body of a Sphinx. This ornament being objected to after the first two or three numbers, the Sphinx appeared with the neck truncated; but, being still decked with the consular emblems, continued to intimate emblematically the allusion at once to Egypt, and to the ambiguous character of the first consul. The columns of this paper were dedicated to the most severe attacks upon Buonaparte and the French Government; and as it was highly popular, from the general feelings of the English nation towards both, it was widely dispersed and generally read.