I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

The letters of Charles Lamb, with a sketch of his life, by T.N. Talfourd (ed. 1837)