The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 164: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

142 THE COURT OF LONDON ineffably mournful, as if the spirit of some departed mother had returned to earth to sing a lullaby over the cradle of the babe whom she had left behind her. With enthralled senses and with an interest painfully acute did the prince feel that his eyes were fixed upon a certain spot beyond all power of withdrawal; and there, in that spot, the cloud grew thicker and more dense, until a female shape appeared in the midst. And now that shape passed slowly, slowly along before the prince, upon whose forehead a cold dew broke forth; and, with feelings wrought up to horror indescribable, did he recognize in the spectral form the once glorious beauty of one of the many victims of his lust. But as he still gazed with haggard eyes, another shape stood slowly forth from the dark cloud, and then another, and another, and another. And they each and all wore the semblance of lovely girls whom he had wooed and either seduced or ravished in his time, fair creatures who had gone down to the tomb with broken hearts and blighted affections, in shame and infamy. But although these spectral shapes wore the semblance of those perished victims, yet was their beauty glacial with the colourless hue and the marble inanimation of death, and their forms were wrapped in the long, flowing garments of the grave. Slowly, like a funereal procession, did the phantoms move around the couch, each circuit that they made rendering them more dreadful to look upon and likewise adding to their number. | And now some appeared to have babes in their arms, — spectral babes, as ghastly as the parents that clasped them to their marble bosoms, babes which were the fruit of those pleasures that the prince had purchased either by means of the most insidious perfidy or the most heartless violence. And those infants had all died either at their births or soon afterward, some sacrificed to the fatal compression adopted by their miserable mothers to conceal their shame, others murdered outright by suffocation, or even by a bloody violence, during the puerperal aberrations of those dis- honoured beings who gave them birth. Around the prince’s couch did the grim and ghastly pro- cession go, the shapes alike of mothers and babes gradually losing their natural lineaments and becoming horrible, horrible to gaze upon. And with their stony eyes ail they CONnNICLMOOlKS (CO)