The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 170: what you’re looking at

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

144 THE COURT OF LONDON And with the giddy dance of the skeleton throng whirled the brain of the maddened prince; torture and horror, cruci- fixion and anguish, delirium and despair, all seemed to en- wrap him with the pains of hell. He tossed and heaved in his couch as if the voluptuous feather-bed were a huge snake coiled under him and the downy pillows were filled with scorpions. The perspiration poured off him in torrents; the veins of his forehead were swollen as if tensely strung blue cords lay entertwined and knotted just beneath the skin. Oh, the fierce, the wearing, the rending agony of these few minutes during which the gleaming train of skeletons circled about the royal bed. And now, rapidly as a troop of dancers glide from the stage of a theatre when their part is over, did the hideous phantasmagoria disappear, skeleton after skeleton, and darkness, stupendous darkness, fell upon the scene. But this darkness was only a portion of the prince’s vision; for the wax lights, the lamp, and the fire still burned in the apartment. Therefore was it in his dream that he was en- tombed in so dense and pitchy a blackness; and while he fancied that his eyes were wide open and looking, as it were, into this deep, unfathomable gloom, vivid lightnings ap- peared to gleam at short intervals across the palpable dark- ness. And then an awful voice, sonorous as if it were the rolling of a huge metal ball on an elastic bridge of brass, and solemn as if it came from a being whose abode was on the other side of the tomb, spoke in the following manner: ‘‘O prince, has the world no warnings for thee, and has hell no terrors, that thou livest in defiance alike of God and man? From him to whom much is given, much is expected; but although earth hath no example of a being on whose head such benefits are heaped as on thine, still hast thou paid not the smallest mite into the treasury of the future. The white page allotted to thee in the book of the recording angel is a blank; whereas thy black page is covered with entries written in the hues of blood. A moral scourge art thou upon the earth; and already are thy crimes so great that if not another misdeed were added, still hast thou done enough to render thy name accursed until the end of time. The present generation, blinded by the dazzling rays of royalty, beholds not all the hideous blackness of thy character; but when, in COmIicboooks co mM