The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 201: what you’re looking at

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

176 THE COURT OF LONDON aristocratic flunkyism which belong to the hierarchy of royal households, having gradually risen from page of the back stairs through the various phases of page of the front stairs, silver stick, gold stick, groom of the stole, and Heaven knows what beside in the service of the king, until he settled down into the comfortable place which we now find him occupying about the person of the Princess Sophia. Heavens! what annals of the court were contained in this man’s memory. All the cells of his brain were so many encyclopedias filled with court anecdotes, intrigues, scan- dals, depravities, and scoundrelisms. How many villainies amongst proud nobles had he been the means of hushing up! How many frailties on the part of high-born ladies had he been instrumental in veiling from the public eye! How many noble lords had he known who were the most ignoble rascals on the face of God’s earth! How many maids of honour had he seen in his time who were no maids at all! How many gentlemen of the bedchamber had he been acquainted with whose private deeds were so ungentlemanly that even at Crockford’s den of infamy they were scouted as blacklegs! How many ladies in waiting had he known who were so unladylike as to prefer their husband’s grooms to their husbands themselves! How many Royal Highnesses had he bowed to who by their conduct deserved to have been styled royal basenesses! Then, was he not also—this Sir Robert Conway — a veritable perambulating court guide, a peripatetic blue book of the aristocracy? He knew everybody and everything in the spheres of the court, high life, and fashion. Did anybody happen to say in his presence, “‘ By the bye, who did Lord Cranbury marry?’’ he would immediately have the answer ready to fall from the tip of his tongue, to the effect, for example’s sake, that ‘the Right Honourable Augustus Octavius Stanhope St. James, sixth Earl of Cran- bury, married the Honourable Miranda Amelia Jacintha Constantina Arlington, third daughter of Fitzallan Seymour Portman Aulet, third Baron Rochdale, who married Lady Eliza Alexandrina Catherina Marietta Berkeley.’ In all other court and aristocratic matters, even to the minutest details of pedigree and genealogy, was this master of the household equally well versed and precise, and for this CONNIE OO KS (E(0)