which led him to explore the entrails of his victims, and to feast his eyes upon their quivering hearts.  After causing his first minister Ibn-Semsama to be beaten to death, he cut his body open, and with his own knife sliced the brave man’s heart.  On another occasion he had 500 prisoners brought before him.  Seizing a sharp lance he first explored the region of the ribs, and then plunged the spear-point into the heart of each victim in succession.  A garland of these hearts was made and hung up on the gate of Tunis.  The Arabs regarded the heart as the seat of thought in man, the throne of the will, the center of intellectual existence.  In this preoccupation with the hearts of his victims we may therefore trace the jealousy of human life which Ibrahim displayed in his murder of pregnant women, as well as a tyrant’s fury against the organ which had sustained his foes in their resistance.  We can only comprehend the combination of sanguinary lust with Ibrahim’s vigorous conduct of civil and military affairs, on the hypothesis that this man-tiger, as Amari, to whom I owe these details, calls him, was possessed with a specific madness.

APPENDIX II.

Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, lib. i. cap. 4. See Chap. iv. p. 195.

After the freedom regained by the expulsion of the Duke of Athens and the humbling of the nobles, regularity for the future in the government might have been expected, since a very great equality among the burghers had been established in consequence of those troubles.  The city too had been divided into quarters, and the supreme magistracy of the republic assigned to the eight priors, called Signori Priori di liberta, together with the Gonfalonier of Justice.  The eight priors were chosen, two for each quarter; the Gonfalonier, their chief, differed in no respect from his colleagues save in precedence of dignity; and as the fourth part of the honors pertained to the members of the lesser arts, their turn kept coming round to that quarter to which the Gonfalonier belonged.  This magistracy remained for two whole months, always living and sleeping in the Palace; in order that, according to the notion of our ancestors, they might be able to attend with greater diligence to the affairs of the commonwealth, in concert with their colleagues, who were the sixteen gonfaloniers of the companies of the people, and the twelve buoni uomini, or special advisers of the Signory.  These magistrates collectively in one body were called the College, or else the Signory and the Colleagues.  After this magistracy came the Senate; the number of which varied, and the name of which was altered several times up to the year 1494, according to circumstances.  The larger councils, whose business it was to discuss and make the laws and all provisions both general and particular, were until that date two; the one called the Council of the people, formed only by the