hours in the twenty-four in the most unwholesome, as well as
nauseous air in the universe, and which hath in his case
corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his morals.

[13] A predecessor of mine used to boast that he made one
thousand pounds a-year in his office; but how he did this (if
indeed he did it) is to me a secret. His clerk, now mine, told
me I had more business than he had ever known there; I am sure I
had as much as any man could do. The truth is, the fees are so
very low, when any are due, and so much is done for nothing,
that, if a single justice of peace had business enough to employ
twenty clerks, neither he nor they would get much by their labor.

The public will not, therefore, I hope, think I betray a secret
when I inform them that I received from the Government a yearly
pension out of the public service money; which, I believe,
indeed, would have been larger had my great patron been
convinced of an error, which I have heard him utter more than
once, that he could not indeed say that the acting as a principal
justice of peace in Westminster was on all accounts very
desirable, but that all the world knew it was a very lucrative
office. Now, to have shown him plainly that a man must be a
rogue to make a very little this way, and that he could not make
much by being as great a rogue as he could be, would have
required more confidence than, I believe, he had in me, and more
of his conversation than he chose to allow me; I therefore
resigned the office and the farther execution of my plan to my
brother, who had long been myassistant. And now, lest the case
between me and the reader should be the same in both instances as
it was between me and the great man, I will not add another word