The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 94: what you’re looking at

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

¥: THE SEARCH AFTER A SON 71 ‘“T know it — I know it,” groaned the unhappy monarch; ‘but he is my son, — the offspring of Hannah Lightfoot — ”’ ‘Oh, horror! ’’ exclaimed the baronet; and, sinking upon the sofa, he covered his face with his hands and gave irre- sistible vent to the convulsive anguish of his soul. “Just Heaven! what mean you, father?’ cried the Princess Amelia at the same moment, and she sprang from her kneeling posture like a corpse that is galvanized. ‘““T mean,”’ said the king, staggering beneath the weight of a tremendous affliction and speaking in a hollow voice, ‘““T mean that in my youth I loved and seduced a heavenly creature, and that Sir Richard Stamford—” | ‘““ Oh, say no more, say no more!’ murmured the princess, tottering to a seat, on which she fell; ‘“ he is my brother — my brother — and God will avenge this incest.”’ “Incest! no—no—do not say that!’ exclaimed the wretched king, shivering all over. ‘“ You have not been thus far culpable, Amelia? Tell me that you have not.” But the unhappy princess made no reply. Pale as marble, and with arms hanging straight down as if she had lost their use, Amelia reclined back in the chair, her eyes fixed with a vacant wildness upon the ghastly and convulsing counte- nance of the king. And now this miserable monarch could no longer repress the groans and anguished sobs that bespoke all the horror of the ideas agitating in his brain, and affording so unquestion- able a confirmation of the appalling truth of the tale of incest which had thus reached its crowning catastrophe. No pen can describe the full horror of the scene; no power of language can do justice to the exquisite agony that was experienced by the baronet, the tremendous remorse and withering self-reproaches endured by the monarch, or the dumb and blank despair that had seized upon the guilty girl. Never, oh, never did the four walls of a room enclose three human beings so utterly stricken by all the most rend- ing or annihilating feelings that the human breast can know; never was the atmosphere of a dwelling-place so laden with passionate ejaculations of bitter misery, or pierced by looks of such wild and fearful meaning. For the word incest had stricken like a moral pestilence upon two hearts that a few moments before were beating with fervid love, and had excited in a third heart all the excruciating agonies CORnNICLOOKS (C(O)