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 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.