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.
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