of the royalists were in a high state of excitement. Meantime, among the meaner orders of both the great parties, who regarded with aversion the sovereign authority of the Chief Consul, there wanted not hearts wicked enough, nor hands sufficiently desperate, for attempts far different from these. The lawfulness, nay, the merit and the glory of tyrranicide, were ideas familiar to the Jacobins of every degree; and, during the years of miserable convulsion which followed the imprisonment and murder of Louis XVI., the royalist bands had often been joined, and sometimes guided, by persons in whom a naturally fanatical spirit, goaded by the sense of intolerable wrongs, dared to think of revenge--no matter how accomplished--as the last and noblest of duties: nor is it wonderful that amidst a long protracted civil war, when scenes of battle and slaughter were relieved only by the hardships of skulking in woods and the fears of famine, the character of others, originally both pure and gentle, had come to be degraded into a callous indifference of dark sullenness of temper, fit preparatives for deeds, the thought of which, in earlier and better days, would have been horror and loathing. It was among the Jacobins, who had formerly worshipped Buonaparte as the "child and champion" of their creed, that the first schemes of assassination were agitated. An Italian sculptor, by name Ceracchi, who had modelled the bust of Napoleon while he held his court at Montebello, arrived in Paris, and, under pretence of retouching his work, solicited admission to the presence of the new Cæsar, whose Brutus he had resolved to be. The occupations of the Consul did not permit of this, and the Italian, having opened his purpose to Topineau, Lebrun, a painter, the adjutant-general Arena, Damerville, and others of kindred sentiments, arranged a plan by which Buonaparte was to have been surrounded and stabbed in the lobby of the opera house. But one of the accomplices betrayed the conspiracy; and Ceracchi and his associates were arrested in the theatre, at the moment when they were expecting their victim.