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 of our sober walks we overtook a lazy
slouching boy, or hobble-dehoy, with a rusty coat, and trousers not too
long, and big feet trailing lazily one after the other, and large lazy
hands dawdling from out the tight sleeves, and in the lazy hands a
little book, which my lad held up to his face, and which I dare say
so charmed and ravished him, that he was blind to the beautiful sights
around him; unmindful, I would venture to lay any wager, of the lessons
he had to learn for to-morrow; forgetful of mother, waiting supper, and
father preparing a scolding;--absorbed utterly and entirely in his book.