The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 169: what you’re looking at

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

THE PRINCE’S DREAM 143 glare on the anguished prince, — those eyes which lost their vital colouring and became of a dull, light, leaden blue. Yes, mothers and babes alike glared thus on the prince; babes and mothers reproached him equally with their dead, lustreless orbs. 3 And though no word was said, yet were these corpselike eyes as eloquent as tongues. For they renewed in the har- rowed memory of the prince all the details of his amours with those whose phantoms now reproached him with their stony looks; and he felt that he was a vile seducer in some instances and a cold-blooded ravisher in others. Then he was reminded that he was the father of those babes whose innocent lives had been extinguished almost as soon as the, spark had gleamed; and the tremendous truth was held up before him in all its darkest, blackest colours, that he was the man who deserved to be stigmatized as the moral murderer, if not the actual assassin. And now a wild cry, whose agonizing intonations evinced all the pangs endured by the conscience-stricken man, burst from his lips, a cry that mental torture wrung from him in his sleep, an expression of inward poignancy sent forth from the chaos of a soul whereon the spirit of remorse was moving. Still he awoke not; despite of the lancinating anguish which rent his entire being, he slumbered on. And more quickly began to circle the ghastly train of phantoms around his bed, and yet more hideous did they grow. The lamplight seemed to impart a living lustre to the wasted and faded lineaments, making death more appalling and the uprisen tenants of the grave more terrible to gaze upon. But by degrees they lost the flowing garments that wrapped their forms, and their forms began to lose their flesh and their shapeliness therewith, until at last it was a troop of bleached and gleaming skeletons which now whirled and whirled and whirled around the bed of the princely sleeper. Mothers and babes, on the skeletons went; babes and mothers, around and around the couch they glided on. With rattling bones the awful pageantry of death swept past and fast; and on the horror-stricken prince did the hideous shapes now seem to glare with eyeless sockets. Yes, past and fast went the grim array, mothers and babes, babes and mothers, all with rattling bones. (C(O) Anyi } KS \