The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 88: what you’re looking at

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

66 THE COURT OF LONDON ter of our tale, the king experienced emotions of sorrow and alarm at the predicament in which that man who was indeed really his son had become involved. But he dared not inter- fere; and he was compelled likewise to throw a veil over his affliction, or at least attribute it to some other cause. The newspapers of the time had represented the fact of the extraordinary resemblance which Sir Richard Stamford bore to the royal family, and the king often sighed pro- foundly in secret as those statements recalled so vividly to his recollection all the incidents of his early love and his amour with Hannah Lightfoot. It had been, therefore, with an unfeigned joy that his Majesty, after anxiously watching the progress of events and greedily devouring all that the public prints detailed with regard to Sir Richard , Stamford, — it was with an indescribable relief, we say, that the king read at length of the baronet’s complete exculpation from the monstrous charges laid against him. And now that any circumstances connected with the amour of his earlier years was brought back more vividly than ever to the memory of the monarch, now that his interview with Meagles and Lady Letitia Lade had bared the wounds that time had failed to heal altogether, and now that the minutest associations belonging to the history and fate of Hannah Lightfoot were aroused to new life in the depth of his soul, it is not to be wondered at if the miserable mon- arch were led by those reminiscences and those feelings to experience a strong, a natural, and irresistible yearning at least to behold the man on whom he had stamped his image. Persons who have offended against the laws of society or of nature are ofttimes moved by singular and irresistible impulses to revisit the scene of their iniquity, even though years and years may have passed away, or else to make atonement by anonymous means to the individuals whom they wronged in earlier days. The undetected murderer is sure to experience a hankering and longing to return to the spot where he buried his victim; and the inscrutable hand of destiny will be certain sooner or later to conduct him thither, even in spite of himself. The man who has gathered gold in the nastiest ways remembers at length the petty sums which he pilfered when a boy from his master’s till; and in an anonymous letter he returns the amount, with interest and compound interest duly reckoned, and then his CONNIE IOOKS m