The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

moe MYSTERIES OF THE COURT OF LONDON CHAPTER I THE SECRET CONCLAVE It was about six o’clock in the evening, three or four days after the occurrences just related, that four persons were absorbed in earnest conversation in a small but well-rurnished parlour in Bury Street, St. James’s. © One was a venerable-looking old man, with white hair, and a demeanour that was at once imposing and calculated to inspire a profound respect. He was dressed in a some- what old-fashioned style, but with a remarkable precision and neatness; and in the buttonhole of his _ lapelling double-breasted coat he wore the ribbon of a foreign order. The second individual in this group was a fine, tall, hand- some man, in the prime of life, but with a certain air of dissipation and debauchery beneath the gentility of his appearance. His manners were those of a polished courtier; his apparel was in the best possible taste; and yet there was a something about him, which, to the eye of the keen observer accustomed to look deeper than the surface, denoted the accomplished rake and finished voluptuary. The third was a still younger man, of equally aristocratic appearance with the two individuals just presented to our readers, dressed as fashionably and as elegantly as the second, and having all the seriousness of countenance which characterized the first. His age could not have exceeded thirty; and yet his discourse was as measured, his air as 1 CONnNICLOOKS (C(O)