Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/72

6 'He means Charles the Second, once the King of England,' he explained to me. 'That is the great and wonderfully clever Doctor Julius, the Director-General of my Military Hospitals, and one of my Ministers of State.'

He now led me into several great houses where resided men and women who had formerly filled the highest places upon earth, but who had utterly destroyed themselves by leading lives of constant pleasure, vice, and degradation. The portraits and pictures presented to our view by Tacitus, Gibbon, Hallam, and hundreds of other historians, appeared to me to be reproduced here on a gigantic and revolting scale. Hideous pictures were painted on many of the houses. I was in the centre of a crowd of brawlers, gamblers, blasphemers, drunkards, and larrikins, who eyed me with suspicion and hatred, and who, I believe, would have torn me to pieces had it not been for the presence of the police. On one side I saw an imitation of the famous Parc aux Cerfs where Louis the Fifteenth revelled in shameless debauchery with the Marchioness of Pompadour, Madame Barry and his other mistresses, who were now his scourging and tormenting serpents. On the other I saw a vast building, on which the words 'Hall of Inexpressible Delight' showed resplendent in large variegated lamps; this was crowded with kings and queens, dukes, barons, courtiers, and women of high rank. My companion pointed out several of them to me by name; amongst them I grieve to say that our Charles the Second was particularly conspicuous.

He lay on a leaden couch, surrounded by women who pretended to be weeping bitterly, so bitterly that one might have thought they had onions concealed in their handkerchiefs. He appeared to be at the point of death, although I well knew could not die. The honest-looking Doctor