The guinea gets into the hands of a justice of the peace, in the shape of a bribe, and a very remarkable state of corruption and traffic in iniquity is displayed. The little pencilling of a quaint figure holding the scales occurs on the margin of a paragraph which records a warm dispute between the justice and his clerk on the proportioning of their plunder, the clerk revolting against an arrangement by which it is proposed to confine him to a bare third! The dispute is checked by the arrival of some customers, matrons dwelling within the justice's district, who come to compound with him in regular form 'for the breach of those laws he is appointed to support.'
The sketches pencilled in 'Chrysal' do not follow the story very closely; indeed, they can hardly be intimately associated with the text they accompany. This, however, is quite an exceptional case; the drawings found in Mr. Thackeray's books being, in nearly every instance, very felicitous embodiments of the subject-matter of the works they illustrate.
On a fly-leaf of 'Chrysal' is a jovial sketch of light-hearted and nimble-toed tars, forming a realistic picture of the good cheer a guinea may command, and immediately suggestive of bags of prize-money, apoplectically stored with the yellow boys which, in the good old days, were supposed to profusely line the pockets of true salts when they indulged in the delights of a spell on shore: this was the time when sailors experimented in frying, as the story represents them, superfluous watches in bacon-fat, as a scientific relaxation, when the ships were paid off at Portsmouth, and 'jolly tars' had invested in more timekeepers than the exigencies of punctuality strictly demanded.
CHAPTER V.
Continental Ramble—A Stolen Trip to Paris—Residence at Weimar—Contributions to Albums—Burlesque State—German Sketches and Studies—The Weimar Theatre—Goethe—Souvenirs of the Saxon city—'Journal kept during a visit to Germany.'
We cannot take leave of Thackeray's college days without referring to the first trip he made to Paris during a vacation, on his own responsibility, and, indeed, without consulting his pastors and masters on the subject. This little episode occurred when he was nineteen years old; and, excepting for considerable remorse at the subterfuge by which he had got away, he seems to have enjoyed himself very much.
