about him. He establishes himself firmly in the land with great joy
and plenty; and he gathers round him all that makes life full-toned
and harmonious, from the grand timbre of draught-ale and the
organ-thunder of hunting, to the piccolo and tintinnabulum of Poker
and maraschino. His life is a fresco-painting, on which some Cyclopæan
Raphaelite has poured his rainbows from a fire-engine of a hundred
elephant-power.

We paltry officials live meanly in pen-and-ink sketches. Our little
life is bounded by a dream of promotion and pension. We toil, we
slave; we put by money, we pinch ourselves. We are hardly fit to live
in this beautiful world, with its laughing girls and grapes, its
summer seas, its sunshine and flowers, its Garnet Wolseleys and
bulbuls. We go moping through its glories in green spectacles,
befouling it with our loathsome statistics and reports. The sweet air
of heaven, the blue firmament, and the everlasting hills do not
satisfy our poisoned hearts; so we make to ourselves a little tin-pot
world of blotted-paper, debased rupees, graded lists, and tinsel
honours; we try to feed our lungs on its typhoidal effluvia. Aroint[T]
thee, Comptroller and Accountant-General with all thy grisly crew!
Thou art worse than the blind Fury with the abhorred shears; for thou
slittest my thin-spun pay-wearing spectacles, thrice branded varlet!
[There is a lily on my brow with anguish moist and fever-dew, and on
my cheeks a fading rose fast withereth too, and for these emblems of
woe thou shalt have to give an answer.]

Dear Vanity, of course you understand that I do not allude to the
amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the
mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my
own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment