



Produced by Donald Lainson





ROUNDABOUT PAPERS

By William Makepeace Thackeray




CONTENTS


ROUNDABOUT PAPERS


On a Lazy Idle Boy

On Two Children in Black

On Ribbons

On some late Great Victories

Thorns in the Cushion

On Screens in Dining-Rooms

Tunbridge Toys

De Juventute

On a Joke I once heard from the late Thomas Hood

Round about the Christmas Tree

On a Chalk-Mark on the Door

On being Found Out

On a Hundred Years Hence

Small-Beer Chronicle

Ogres

On Two Roundabout Papers which I intended to Write

A Mississippi Bubble

On Letts's Diary

Notes of a Week's Holiday

Nil Nisi Bonum

On Half a Loaf--A Letter to Messrs. Broadway, Battery and Co., of New
York, Bankers

The Notch on the Axe.--A Story a la Mode. Part I Part II Part III

De Finibus

On a Peal of Bells

On a Pear-Tree

Dessein's

On some Carp at Sans Souci

Autour de mon Chapeau

On Alexandrines--A Letter to some Country Cousins

On a Medal of George the Fourth

"Strange to say, on Club Paper"

The Last Sketch




ROUNDABOUT PAPERS.




ON A LAZY IDLE BOY.


I had occasion to pass a week in the autumn in the little old town
of Coire or Chur, in the Grisons, where lies buried that very ancient
British king, saint, and martyr, Lucius,* who founded the Church of St.
Peter, on Cornhill. Few people note the church now-a-days, and fewer
ever heard of the saint. In the cathedral at Chur, his statue appears
surrounded by other sainted persons of his family. With tight red
breeches, a Roman habit, a curly brown beard, and a neat little gilt
crown and sceptre, he stands, a very comely and cheerful image: and,
from what I may call his peculiar position with regard to Cornhill, I
beheld this figure of St. Lucius with more interest than I should have
bestowed upon personages who, hierarchically, are, I dare say, his
superiors.

     * Stow quotes the inscription, still extant, from the table
     fast chained in St. Peter's Church, Cornhill; and says, "he
     was after some chronicle buried at London, and after some
     chronicle buried at Glowcester"--but, oh! these incorrect
     chroniclers! when Alban Butler, in the "Lives of the
     Saints," v. xii., and Murray's "Handbook," and the Sacristan
     at Chur, all say Lucius was killed there, and I saw his tomb
     with my own eyes!

The pretty little city stands, so to speak, at the end of the world--of
the world of to-day, the world of rapid motion, and rushing railways,
and the commerce and intercourse of men. From the northern gate, the
iron road stretches away to Zurich, to Basle, to Paris, to home. From
the old southern barriers, before which a little river rushes, and
around which stretch the crumbling battlements of the ancient town, the
road bears the slow diligence or lagging vetturino by the shallow Rhine,
through the awful gorges of the Via Mala, and presently over the Splugen
to the shores of Como.

I have seldom seen a place more quaint, pretty, calm, and pastoral, than
this remote little Chur. What need have the inhabitants for walls
and ramparts, except to build summer-houses, to trail vines, and hang
clothes to dry on them? No enemies approach the great mouldering gates:
only at morn and even the cows come lowing past them, the village
maidens chatter merrily round the fountains, and babble like the
ever-voluble stream that flows under the old walls. The schoolboys,
with book and satchel, in smart uniforms, march up to the gymnasium,
and return thence at their stated time. There is one coffee-house in the
town, and I see one old gentleman goes to it. There are shops with no
customers seemingly, and the lazy tradesmen look out of their little
windows at the single stranger sauntering by. There is a stall with
baskets of queer little black grapes and apples, and a pretty brisk
trade with half a dozen urchins standing round. But, beyond this, there
is scarce any talk or movement in the street. There's nobody at the
book-shop. "If you will have the goodness to come again in an hour,"
says the banker, with his mouthful of dinner at one o'clock, "you can
have the money." There is nobody at the hotel, save the good landlady,
the kind waiters, the brisk young cook who ministers to you. Nobody is
in the Protestant church--(oh! strange sight, the two confessions are
here at peace!)--nobody in the Catholic church: until the sacristan,
from his snug abode in the cathedral close, espies the traveller eying
the monsters and pillars before the old shark-toothed arch of his
cathedral, and comes out (with a view to remuneration possibly) and
opens the gate, and shows you the venerable church, and the queer old
relics in the sacristy, and the ancient vestments (a black velvet
cope, amongst other robes, as fresh as yesterday, and presented by that
notorious "pervert," Henry of Navarre and France), and the statue of St.
Lucius who built St. Peter's Church, on Cornhill.

What a quiet, kind, quaint, pleasant, pretty old town! Has it been
asleep these hundreds and hundreds of years, and is the brisk young
Prince of the Sidereal Realms in his screaming car drawn by his snorting
steel elephant coming to waken it? Time was when there must have been
life and bustle and commerce here. Those vast, venerable walls were
not made to keep out cows, but men-at-arms, led by fierce captains, who
prowled about the gates, and robbed the traders as they passed in and
out with their bales, their goods, their pack-horses, and their wains.
Is the place so dead that even the clergy of the different denominations
can't quarrel? Why, seven or eight, or a dozen, or fifteen hundred years
ago (they haven't the register at St. Peter's up to that remote period.
I dare say it was burnt in the fire of London)--a dozen hundred years
ago, when there was some life in the town, St. Lucius was stoned here
on account of theological differences, after founding our church in
Cornhill.

There was a sweet pretty river walk we used to take in the evening
and mark the mountains round glooming with a deeper purple; the shades
creeping up the golden walls; the river brawling, the cattle calling,
the maids and chatter-boxes round the fountains babbling and bawling;
and several times in the course