The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 340: what you’re looking at

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

MADAME ANGELIQUE’S THREE BILLETS 309 tered his twenty-first year, and would inherit on attaining his majority a fortune of sixty thousand pounds, if he had not already anticipated it by bills and bonds to the tune of nearly one-half. He had recently obtained a commission in the Guards, and on being emancipated from the apron strings of his fashionable mamma, he had resolved to see a little of “life.” It was however chiefly at night-time that he took his survey of what he termed “‘ life,’’ for inasmuch as he was never in bed until three or four o’clock in the morning, he slept till it was time to turn out for parade, after which he drank so copiously of bottled stout and cherry-brandy at lunch, “ just to give a tone to his stomach,” that he was usually constrained to go to bed again in order to sleep off the effects of so much liquor and rise refreshed for dinner- time. Then his stomach required a new “ tone,’’ and if a couple of bottles of champagne, with other vinous fluids, were capable of affording such tone, the Honourable Augustus Softly certainly adopted the panacea for procuring it. Turn- ing out “ to see life’ at ten o’clock at night, he had the ad- vantage of the gas-lamps to show him how to break police- men’s heads; or else he dropped into some fashionable gambling-house, where there was light sufficient for the black- legs and sharpers there to pillage him most unmercifully, though apparently not light enough to show the young gen- tleman himself that he was thus fleeced. In personal appearance the Honourable Augustus Softly was short and thin, totally beardless, though he adopted every known method of inducing a moustache to make its appearance against its own inclination, and his air was alto- gether so boyish that he did not look above seventeen.. He had tolerably regular features, of an aristocratic cast, but the expression of his countenance was insipid and vacant, even to stolidity. Frivolous-minded and shallow-pated, with all the follies of a boy, he rather aped than was endowed with the manners of aman. His idea of “ life ’’ seemed to consist in hurrying himself on to rack and ruin as fast as ever he could, raising money at exorbitant interest, plunging into debt, lavishing his gold upon pretended friends, who flattered him to his face and laughed at him behind his back, playing the spendthrift amongst the dissolute and the depraved, thinking it one of the finest things to drop a few hundreds at the gaming-table, and the finest thing of all to let my Lord CORMNICLOO© SS (CO)