work as Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office to be altogether
too much for him. And then it was no doubt his intention to join
literature with the Civil Service. He had been taught to regard the
Civil Service as easy, and had counted upon himself as able to add it to
his novels, and his work with his _Punch_ brethren, and to his
contributions generally to the literature of the day. He might have done
so, could he have risen at five, and have sat at his private desk for
three hours before he began his official routine at the public one. A
capability for grinding, an aptitude for continuous task work, a
disposition to sit in one's chair as though fixed to it by cobbler's
wax, will enable a man in the prime of life to go through the tedium of
a second day's work every day; but of all men Thackeray was the last to
bear the wearisome perseverance of such a life. Some more or less
continuous attendance at his office he must have given, and with it
would have gone _Punch_ and the novels, the ballads, the burlesques, the
essays, the lectures, and the monthly papers full of mingled satire and
tenderness, which have left to us that Thackeray which we could so ill
afford to lose out of the literature of the nineteenth century. And
there would have remained to the Civil Service the memory of a
disgraceful job.

He did not, however, give up the idea of the Civil Service. In a letter
to his American friend, Mr. Reed, dated 8th November, 1854, he says;
"The secretaryship of our Legation at Washington was vacant the other
day, and I instantly asked for it; but in the very kindest letter Lord
Clarendon showed how the petition was impossible. First, the place was
given away. Next, it would not be fair to appoint out of the service.
But the first was an excellent reason;--not a doubt of it." The validity
of the second was probably not so apparent to him as it is to one who
has himself waited long for promotion. "So if ever I come," he