[jQuery] I would like to return xhtml character entities

[Rob]

I would like to grab a string that contains '<' and '>' and NOT have
jQuery eval and force my browser to render it has html. It's
difficult for me to convey what I want, but basically I am trying to
send it latin or unicode entity references for the angle brackets and
want to write those brackets as literal brackets, not rendered as
html...

I dunno if that makes sense so here is the code I am testing with:

html -
<div class="test">
        <div>
                &#60;div&#62;
                        &#60;p&#62;This is a sample paragraph.&#60;/p&#62;
                        &#60;p&#62;This is another sample paragraph.&#60;/p&#62;
                        &#60;p&#62;This is one last sample 
paragraph.&#60;/p&#62;
                &#60;/div&#62;
        </div>
</div>

jQ -
$(document).ready(function() {
        $codetext = $("div.test div").text();
        $("div.test div").empty();
        $("div.test div").append($codetext);
});