about midnight
Each minute the streets seemed to grow more spacious and more brilliant , and the multitude more dense and more excited . Beautiful buildings , too , rose before him ; palaces , and churches , and streets , and squares of imposing architecture ; to his inexperienced eye and unsophisticated spirit their route appeared a never-ending triumph . To the hackney-coachman , however , who had no imagination , and who was quite satiated with metropolitan experience , it only appeared that he had had an exceeding good fare , and that he was jogging up from Bishopsgate Street to Charing Cross . When Jarvis , therefore , had safely deposited his charge at Morley 's Hotel , in Cockspur Street , and extorted from them an extra shilling , in consideration of their evident rustication , he bent his course towards the Opera House ; for clouds were gathering , and , with the favour of Providence , there seemed a chance about midnight of picking up some helpless beau , or desperate cabless dandy , the choicest victim , in a midnight shower , of these public conveyancers . The coffee-room at Morley 's was a new scene of amusement to Ferdinand , and he watched with great diversion the two evening papers portioned out among twelve eager quidnuncs , and the evident anxiety which they endured , and the nice diplomacies to which they resorted , to obtain the envied journals . The entrance of our two travellers so alarmingly increasing the demand over the supply , at first seemed to attract considerable and not very friendly notice ; but when a malignant half-pay officer , in order to revenge himself for the restless watchfulness of his neighbour , a political doctor of divinity , offered the journal , which he had long finished , to Glastonbury , and it was declined , the general alarm visibly diminished . Poor Mr. Glastonbury had never looked into a newspaper in his life , save the County Chronicle , to which he occasionally contributed a communication , giving an account of the digging up of some old coins , signed Antiquarius ; or of the exhumation of some fossil remains , to which he more boldly appended his initials .