Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Thackerayglum and serious. You eschew dark thoughts: and desireto be cheerful and merry in the main.” And, suchbeing the case, you see we must have no RoundaboutEssay on this subject.Well, I had another arrow in my quiver. (So, you know,had William Tell a bolt for his son, the apple of his eye;and a shaft for Gessler, in case William came to anytrouble with the first poor little target.) And this, Imust tell you, was to have been a rare Roundabout performance—oneof the very best that has ever appearedin this series. It was to have contained all the deeppathos of Addison; the logical precision of Rabelais; thechildlike playfulness of Swift; the manly stoicism ofSterne; the metaphysical depth of Goldsmith; the blushingmodesty of Fielding; the epigrammatic terseness ofWalter Scott; the uproarious humor of Sam Richardson;and the gay simplicity of Sam Johnson;—it was to havecombined all these qualities, with some excellences ofmodern writers whom I could name:—but circumstanceshave occurred which have rendered this RoundaboutEssay also impossible.I have not the least objection to tell you what was tohave been the subject of that other admirable RoundaboutPaper. Gracious powers! the Dean of St. Patrick’snever had a better theme. The paper was to have been onthe Gorillas, to be sure. I was going to imagine myself tobe a young surgeon-apprentice from Charleston, in SouthCarolina, who ran away to Cuba on account of unhappyfamily circumstances, with which nobody has the leastconcern; who sailed thence to Africa in a large, roomyschooner with an extraordinary vacant space betweendecks. I was subject to dreadful ill treatment from thefirst mate of the ship, who, when I found she was a slaver,altogether declined to put me on shore. I was chased—we were chased—by three British frigates and a seventyfour,which we engaged and captured; but were obligedto scuttle and sink, as we could sell them in no Africanport: and I never shall forget the look of manly resignation,combined with considerable disgust, of the BritishAdmiral as he walked the plank, after cutting off hispigtail, which he handed to me, and which I still have incharge for his family at Boston, Lincolnshire, England.147