a good-natured man and amenable. He attempted to befriend his friend
till he found that it was impossible, and then, with the best grace in
the world, accepted the official nominee that was offered to him.

It may be said that had Thackeray succeeded in that attempt he would
surely have ruined himself. No man can be fit for the management and
performance of special work who has learned nothing of it before his
thirty-seventh year; and no man could have been less so than Thackeray.
There are men who, though they be not fit, are disposed to learn their
lesson and make themselves as fit as possible. Such cannot be said to
have been the case with this man. For the special duties which he would
have been called upon to perform, consisting to a great extent of the
maintenance of discipline over a large body of men, training is
required, and the service would have suffered for awhile under any
untried elderly tiro. Another man might have put himself into harness.
Thackeray never would have done so. The details 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