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Roundabout Papers by William Makepeace Thackeray
page 71 of 372 (19%)
Pantiles, but Parade. I stroll over the Common and survey the beautiful
purple hills around, twinkling with a thousand bright villas, which
have sprung up over this charming ground since first I saw it. What an
admirable scene of peace and plenty! What a delicious air breathes over
the heath, blows the cloud shadows across it, and murmurs through
the full-clad trees! Can the world show a land fairer, richer, more
cheerful? I see a portion of it when I look up from the window at
which I write. But fair scene, green woods, bright terraces gleaming
in sunshine, and purple clouds swollen with summer rain--nay, the very
pages over which my head bends--disappear from before my eyes. They are
looking backwards, back into forty years off, into a dark room, into a
little house hard by on the Common here, in the Bartlemy-tide holidays.
The parents have gone to town for two days: the house is all his own,
his own and a grim old maid-servant's, and a little boy is seated
at night in the lonely drawing-room, poring over "Manfroni, or the
One-Handed Monk," so frightened that he scarcely dares to turn round.




DE JUVENTUTE.


Our last paper of this veracious and roundabout series related to a
period which can only be historical to a great number of readers of this
Magazine. Four I saw at the station to-day with orange-covered books in
their hands, who can but have known George IV. by books, and statues,
and pictures. Elderly gentlemen were in their prime, old men in their
middle age, when he reigned over us. His image remains on coins; on
a picture or two hanging here and there in a Club or old-fashioned
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