own reward.

Granting, which we readily do, that the above scene is an exaggeration,
still we believe it to be nearer the mark than the opposite
representations, which would lead us to believe that all persons in the
employ of Government are overworked and underpaid. Their places are
sinecures; bread for life. Every merchant or employer of labour has the
power of instant dismissal; but in Government offices this great check on
idleness and stupidity is ignored. Officials are happy fellows. The
ills of life do not affect them. Mills may stop, panics may take place,
commerce may decline, ships may rot in deserted harbours; docks and
warehouses, once teeming with busy life, may be silent as the grave--but
their income knows no change, save when death causes a general promotion
in their ranks. The agricultural mind may be weighed down with grief--it
may find its idols but clay. There, where it must live, or bear no life,
it may find all hollow, delusive, and false. The seasons may be
unpropitious. The common ills farmers are heir to, such as potato
disease, the fly at the turnips, the rot in the sheep, may be theirs in
no common degree; nevertheless, the Clapham omnibus duly deposits at the
Treasury in Downing-street Mr. Smith, who, with the exception of two
hours for lunch, and another hour or so for miscellaneous conversation,
and the perusal of the _Times_, will, from ten till four, magnanimously
devote himself to his country's good. At the hour of four, Mr. Smith is
again on the omnibus, about to seek, in the bosom of his family, that
relaxation which, did his country deny him, it would be ungrateful
indeed. Mr. Smith is a family man; and, regardless of London
temptations, he hastens to his mutton at five. On the contrary, the
junior clerk, Mr. Adolphus Blaser, is a young man about town; and just as
Mr. Smith retires to his night's rest, our young _roue_, having recovered
from the effects of a good dinner, is ready to commence the diversions,
or, as they may be more fitly termed, the follies of a night. At a good
old age Mr. Smith is gathered to his fathers, and a tombstone in Norwood
Cemetery calls upon the public to admire those virtues, the loss of which
has left such a blank in the Clapham annals of domestic life. One of Mr.
Smith's companions, a much-maligned individual, has just written to the
_Times_, indignantly asking if it be nothing to attend every day at
Somerset-house, in wet weather or fine?