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.