"For six years Spedding worked away with universal approbation, and all this time he would have been willing to accept a post of précis writer with £300 a year, or any other such recognised position, and attach himself permanently to the office. But none such was placed at his disposal ... and he took the opportunity of the Whig government going out in 1841 to give up his employment. He then applied himself to edit the works and vindicate the fame of Lord Bacon. In 1847, on Sir James Stephen's retirement, the office of Under Secretary of State with £2000 a year was offered to him by Lord Grey, before it was offered to me, and he could not be induced to accept it. He could not be brought to believe, what no one else doubted, that he was equal to the duties. "Be this as it may, the fact that the man being well known and close at hand for six years, who could have been had for £300 a year in 1841, should have been let slip, though he was thought worth £2000 a year in 1847, if not a rare, is a clear example of the little heed given by the Government of this country to the choice and use of instruments." The exact date of Spedding's beginning work at the Colonial Office is not known, but it must have been between the middle of June 1835 and the end of August,[106] for by that time he found that Downing Street was "no place for the indulgence of the individual genius." In a letter to Thompson he writes: I did take the liberty of insinuating a scoff at a Spanish Governor in one of my Despatches, but H. T. said it was clever and would not do. Said H. T. rises day by day in my esteem. He is not the least stiff or awful, but very gentle and majestic. He has a great deal of P. v. A. in him. But we do not talk much except on matters of business, which, however, rises in his hands to the dignity of statesmanship. I have not yet ascertained the contingencies on which my stay here depends, but I should think it probable that I may in the end have the offer of a permanent appointment in the office. If I have, I mean to take it, purely from a sense of duty; that I may have a nominal employment to satisfy impertinent enquiries withal, and perhaps also (as I dream in my more romantic moments) that I may have a real employment to discipline my own soul withal. The prospect of its leading to wealth or dignity is so small under present circumstances as not to be worth taking into account, yet not exactly so neither, for any prospect of any thing to come, however faint and distant, dignifies an employment with a relationship to the future and the indefinite.