The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 286: what you’re looking at

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

THE PRIVATE THEATRICALS 253 where stars, orders, and decorations shone upon the breasts of peers and officers, and jewels of incalculable price gleamed upon the dresses of the ladies, — to gaze upon this scene, we say, was to feel the head turning with the bewilderment of intoxication and the eyes becoming dazzled with this galaxy of diamonds, ornaments, flashing eyes, and natural charms. But, oh, if at the same instant the thoughts could only have travelled to the dens of poverty on Saffron Hill, the haunts of squalor and of wretchedness in Spitalfields and Whitechapel, the abodes of vice and the resorts of crime in the Mint of Southwark, and the low neighbourhoods of demoralization and famine which lie in the vicinage of West- minster Abbey, or if the imagination, at once taking a wider range and starting off to a greater distance, could only have pictured to itself the pale, pining, perishing factory-slave of Lancashire, or the toil-crushed, persecuted, and down- trampled miner of the North, or the poor labourer in the agricultural district, hugging the iron chain of serfdom through the brutalizing ignorance in which the despot’s cunning purposely keeps him, oh, then what a hideous picture would the woes, the miseries, the sufferings, and the wrongs of the millions have furnished in contrast with that scene of splendour, brilliancy, and luxurious ease presented to the view at the private theatre of Carlton House! But to return to our tale. In the midst of that brilliant assemblage, or, rather, retiring from where the blaze of beauty and of jewels was most dazzling, almost shrinking, then, we might say, into the farthest corner, was one young gentleman who in his apparel, his looks, and his thoughts constituted the sole exception to the splendour, the gaiety, and the innate profligacy which characterized all the rest. This young man was Jocelyn Loftus. Well dressed, it is true, in his usual genteel style, he nevertheless rejoiced in no ribbon, star, garter, or other decoration. Neither was he accompanied by any lady who looked amorously upon him or suffered her knees to press against his own, nor did he take any real pleasure in the scene before him. At the same time, if he felt himself out of place there and in an unsuitable element, it was not that he was overawed by the presence of the aristocracy, or that he was awkward or embarrassed as if amongst his superiors and betters. No, it was because Cconniclooolks (C(O)