ls of his work after the
first month would have been inexpressibly wearisome to him. To have gone
into the city, and to have remained there every day from eleven till
five, would have been all but impossible to him. He would not have done
it. And then he would have been tormented by the feeling that he was
taking the pay and not doing the work. There is a belief current, not
confined to a few, that a man may be a Government Secretary with a
generous salary, and have nothing to do. The idea is something that
remains to us from the old days of sinecures. If there be now remaining
places so pleasant, or gentlemen so happy, I do not know them.
Thackeray's notion of his future duties was probably very vague. He
would have repudiated the notion that he was looking for a sinecure, but
no doubt considered that the duties would be easy and light. It is not
too much to assert, that he who could drop his pearls as I have said
above, throwing them wide cast without an effort, would have found his
work as Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office to be altogether
too much for him. And then it was no doubt his intention to join
literature with the Civil Service. He had been taught to regard the
Civil Service as easy, and had counted upon himself as able to add it to
his novels, and his work with his _Punch_ brethren, and to his
contributions generally to the literature of the day. He might have done
so, could he have risen at five, and have sat at his private desk for
three hours before he began his official routine at the public one. A
capability for grinding, an aptitude for continuous task work, a
disposition to sit in one's chair as though fixed to it by cobbler's
wax, will enable a man in the prime of life to go through the tedium of
a second day's work every day; but of all men Thackeray was the last to
bear the wearisome perseverance of such a life. Some more or less
continuous attendance at his office he must have given, and with it
would have gone _Punch_ and the novels, the ballads, the burlesques, the
essays, the lectures, and the monthly papers full of mingled satire and
tenderness, which have left to us that Thackeray which we could so ill
afford to lose out of the literature of the nineteenth century. And
there would have remained to the Civil Service the memory of a
disgraceful job.

He did not, however, give up the idea of the Civil Service. In a letter
to his American friend, Mr. Reed, dated 8th November, 1854,