



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 Rh