slow energy, the patience, practicality, sedulity and sagacity
common to the best English commissioners paid in money and not
expressly otherwise.

For it is the glory of England that she has a turn for fidelity
in practical work; that sham-workers, though very numerous, are
rarer than elsewhere; that a man who undertakes work for you will
still, in various provinces of our affairs, do it, instead of
merely seeming to do it. John Howard, without pay in money,
_did_ this of the Jail-fever, as other Englishmen do work, in a
truly workmanlike manner: his distinction was that he did it
without money. He had not 500 pounds or 5,000 pounds a year of
salary for it; but lived merely on his Bedfordshire estates, and
as Snigsby irreverently expresses it, "by chewing his own cud."
And, sure enough, if any man might chew the cud of placid
reflections, solid Howard, a mournful man otherwise, might at
intervals indulge a little in that luxury.--No money-salary had
he for his work; he had merely the income of his properties, and
what he could derive from within. Is this such a sublime
distinction, then? Well, let it pass at its value. There have
been benefactors of mankind who had more need of money than he,
and got none too. Milton, it is known, did his _Paradise Lost_
at the easy rate of five pounds. Kepler worked out the secret of
the Heavenly Motions in a dreadfully painful manner; "going over
the calculations sixty times;" and having not only no public
money, but no private either; and, in fact, writing almanacs for
his bread-and-water, while he did this of the Heavenly Motions;
having no Bedfordshire estates; nothing but a pension of 18
pounds (which they would not pay him), the valuable faculty of
writing almanacs, and at length the invaluable one of dying, when