Having thus found his place in literature, he began also to be rich in friends, and his life was devoted every moment to thought and affection. The time that he passed at the desk of the India House was time in which he did not live; or perhaps, while he autographed the mercantile books, there was a higher half-conscious life of the fancy which lightly flitted round and round the steady course of his pen. He thus exults, after his emancipation from his clerkship upon a pension:--"I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three; that is, to have three times as much time that is real time--time that is my own--in it. I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But the tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift." For this one-third of his waking time, to have and to hold unhampered by any dependence, he had most willingly consigned the rest to drudgery. The value which he set upon it appears from the following answer which he made to Bernard Barton, who thought of abandoning his place in a bank and of relying upon literary labor for support:--"Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you! Throw yourself, rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash, headlong, upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them,--come not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread,--some repining, others enjoying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing that they would rather have been tailors, weavers,--what not?--rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a madhouse. Oh! you know not--may you never know!--the miseries of subsisting by authorship." Thus he esteemed of priceless worth honestly-earned independent time for the pursuits that were dearest to him.