as Commissioner of Appeals and of Trade and Plantations.

Many literary men of eminence held office in Queen Anne's reign.

Thus Addison was Secretary of State; Steele, Commissioner of Stamps; Prior, Under-Secretary of State, and afterwards Ambassador to France; Tickell, Under-Secretary of State, and Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland; Congreve, Secretary of Jamaica;, and Gay, Secretary of Legation at Hanover.
Indeed, habits of business, instead of unfitting a cultivated mind for scientific or literary pursuits, are often the best training for them.
Voltaire insisted with truth that the real spirit of business and literature are the same; the perfection of each being the union of energy and thoughtfulness, of cultivated intelligence and practical wisdom, of the active and contemplative essence--a union commended by Lord Bacon as the concentrated excellence of man's nature.

It has been said that even the man of genius can write nothing worth reading in relation to human affairs, unless he has been in some way or other connected with the serious everyday business of life.
Hence it has happened that many of the best books, extant have been written by men of business, with whom literature was a pastime rather than a profession.

Gifford, the editor of the 'Quarterly,' who knew the drudgery of writing for a living, once observed that "a single hour of composition, won from the business of the day, is worth more than the whole day's toil of him who works at the trade of literature: in the one case, the spirit comes joyfully to refresh itself, like a hart to the waterbrooks; in the other, it pursues its miserable way, panting and jaded, with the dogs and hunger of necessity behind." [1319] The first great men of letters in Italy were not mere men of letters; they were men of business--merchants, statesmen, diplomatists, judges, and soldiers.