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William Makepeace Thackeray
Roundabout Papers
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664612120
Table of Contents
ON A JOKE I ONCE HEARD FROM THE LATE THOMAS HOOD.
ROUND ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS TREE.
ON TWO ROUNDABOUT PAPERS WHICH I INTENDED TO WRITE.*
A LETTER TO MESSRS. BROADWAY, BATTERY AND CO., OF NEW YORK, BANKERS.
THE NOTCH ON THE AXE.—A STORY A LA MODE.
A LETTER TO SOME COUNTRY COUSINS.
ON A MEDAL OF GEORGE THE FOURTH.
“STRANGE TO SAY, ON CLUB PAPER.”
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