at might have been steady
enough in a quiet nursery or kitchen in England.

To find a man and wife, both of whom would suit us, would be very
difficult; and I think it right, also, to offer to my clerk to keep him
in my service. He is honest, intelligent, and respectful; and, as he is
rather inclined to consumption, the change of climate would probably be
useful to him. I cannot bear the thought of throwing any person who has
been about me for five years, and with whom I have no fault to find, out
of bread, while it is in my power to retain his services.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

London: December 5, 1833

Dear Lord Lansdowne,--I delayed returning an answer to your kind letter
till this day, in order that I might be able to send you definite
intelligence. Yesterday evening the Directors appointed me to a seat in
the Council of India. The votes were nineteen for me, and three against
me.

I feel that the sacrifice which I am about to make is great. But the
motives which urge me to make it are quite irresistible. Every day that
I live I become less and less desirous of great wealth. But every day
makes me more sensible of the importance of a competence. Without a
competence it is not very easy for a public man to be honest; it is
almost impossible for him to be thought so. I am so situated that I can
subsist only in two ways: by being in office, and by my pen. Hitherto,
literature has been merely my relaxation,--the amusement of perhaps a
month in the year. I have never considered it as the means of support. I
have chosen my own topics, taken my own time, and dictated my own terms.
The thought of becoming a bookseller's hack; of writing to relieve, not
the fulness of the mind, but the emptiness of the pocket; of spurring a
jaded fancy to reluctant exertion; of filling sheets with trash merely
that the sheets may be filled; of bearing from publishers and editors
what Dryden bore from Tonson, and what, to my own knowledge, Mackintosh
bore from Lardner, is horrible to me. Yet thus it must be, if I should
quit office. Yet to hold office merely for the sake of emolument would
be more horrible still. The situation, in which I have been placed for
some time back, would have broken the spirit of many men. It has rather
tended to make me the most mutinous and unmanageable of the followers of
the Government. I tendered my resignation twice during the course of the
last Session. I certainly should not have done so if I had been a