rning
from these reminiscences how Napoleon told Dr. Barry O'Meara that if
he, Napoleon, had had any authority over the English Metropolis, he
would have long ago taken measures for constructing an embankment on
both sides of the Thames as it passed between Middlesex and Surrey. If
Dr. O'Meara had embodied this suggestion in his public volume, Napoleon
might unconsciously have become the projector of the Thames Embankment.
_Fas est ab hoste_--the proverb is somewhat musty.

{15}

CHAPTER LXIV.

POPULAR ALARMS--ROYAL EXCURSIONS.

[Sidenote: 1820--The Cato Street conspiracy]

The plot which has been already mentioned as one of the unpropitious
events that marked the opening of George the Fourth's reign was the
famous Cato Street conspiracy. The conspiracy was nothing less than a
plot for the assassination, all at once, of the whole of his Majesty's
ministers. The principal conspirator was a man named Thistlewood, a
compound of half-crazy fanaticism and desperate villany--a creature who
believed that he had private vengeance to satisfy, and who had, at the
same time, persuaded himself that no good could come to the people of
England until an example had been made of the King's official advisers
by the avenging hand of the lover of liberty. The novelty as well as
the audacity of the plot created a perfect consternation all through
England, and it became, for a while, the sincere conviction of a vast
number of reasonable Englishmen that the whole political and social
system of the kingdom was undermined by such plots, and that only the
most strenuous exertions made by the champions of law and order could
protect the realm from an outbreak of horrors far transcending any of
those that had convulsed France during the worst days of the
Revolution. It was soon made clear enough that Thistlewood's plot was
a conspiracy which included only a very small number of men, and it has
never been quite certain whether it was not originally put in motion by
the machination of some of the paid spies and informers whom it was
believed, at that time, to be the duty of the Ministry to keep in its
service for the detection and the frustration of revolutionary
conspiracy. It was the common practice of spies and informers, in
those days, to go {16} about secretly in quarters where revolutionary
conspiracy was believed to be in existence, to represent themselves to
some of the suspected plotters as fellow-revolutionists and
brot