On the whole, when the time came, his new employment brought him moderate interests of its own. What may be called the literary part of the work, such as the drawing up of reports, naturally fell into his hands. The necessity of working with other people, which does not always come easily to men accustomed to the isolation and independence of their own libraries, he found an agreeable novelty. Still he was not sorry when, at the end of 1864, the chance came to him of a move to the Stationery Office. Here he was the head of a department, and not merely a member of a Board, and the regulation of his hours fell more into his own hands. From the time when he came to London, until his death five and twenty years later (November 1881), his life was for the most part without any incident in which the world can have an interest. He formed many acquaintances according to the cheerful and hospitable fashion of London, and he made a number of warm and attached friends. In 1873 his wife died. In the following year he married a daughter of Mr. James Wilson, well known as the fellow-worker of Cobden and Bright in the agitation against the Corn Laws, and as Finance Minister in India, where he sank under the cares of his office in 1860. Mr. Wilson had been Greg's intimate friend from the days of the League down to the time of his death. When by and by Mr. Greg retired from his post as Controller (1877), he wrote:-- For myself, since I gave up office, I feel comparatively and indeed positively in haven and peace, and with much and rather unusual brightness and sunshine round me, and with my interest in the world, both speculative and practical, quite undiminished, and finding old age on the whole cheerful and quiet, and the position of a _spectator_ by no means an unenviable one. This was his attitude to the end. A heavy shock fell upon him in the death of his brother-in-law, Walter Bagehot (1877), that brilliant original, well known to so many of us, who saw events and books and men with so curious an eye. He was quite a unique man [Mr. Greg wrote to Lady Derby], as irreplaceable in private life as he is universally felt to be in public. He had the soundest head I ever knew since Cornewall Lewis left us, curiously original, yet without the faintest taint of crotchetiness, or prejudice, or passion, which so generally mars originality. Then he was high-minded, and a gentleman to the backbone; the man of all I knew, both mentally and morally, best _worth talking things over with_; and I was besides deeply attached to him personally. We had been intimates and _collaborateurs_ in many lines for twenty-five years; so that altogether there is a great piece gone out of my daily life, and a great stay also--the greatest, in fact. There is no man living who was, taken all in all, so much of me. There is a pensive grace about one of his last letters to the widow of the favourite brother of earlier days:--