Soon after Jonathan left college he went to live in the house of Sir William Temple.  Temple was a great man in his day.  He had been an Ambassador, the friend of kings and princes, and he considered himself something of a scholar.  To him Swift acted as a kind of secretary.  To a proud man the post of secretary or chaplain in a great house was, in those days, no happy one.  It was a position something between that of a servant and a friend, and in it Swift’s haughty soul suffered torments.  Sir William, no doubt, meant to be kind, but he was cold and condescending, and not a little pompous and conceited.  Swift’s fierce pride was ready to fancy insults where none were meant, he resented being “treated like a schoolboy,” and during the years he passed in Sir William’s house he gathered a store of bitterness against the world in his heart.

But in spite of all his miseries real or imaginary, Swift had at least one pleasure.  Among the many people making up the great household there was a little girl of seven named Esther Johnson.  She was a delicate little girl with large eyes and black hair.  She and Swift soon grew to be friends, and he spent his happiest hours teaching her to read and write.  It is pleasant to think of the gloomy, untrained genius throwing off his gloom and bending all his talents to the task of teaching and amusing this little delicate child of seven.

With intervals between, Swift remained in Sir William’s household for about five years.  Here he began to write poetry, but when he showed his poems to Dryden, who was a distant kinsman, he got little encouragement.  “Cousin Swift,” said the great man, “you will never be a poet.”  Here was another blow from a hostile world which Swift could never either forget or forgive.

As the years went on Swift found his position grow more and more irksome.  At last he began to think of entering the Church as a means of earning an independent livelihood and becoming his own master.  And one day, having a quarrel with Sir William, he left his house in a passion and went back to Ireland.  Here after some trouble he was made a priest and received a little seaside parish worth about a hundred pounds a year.

Swift was now his own master, but he found it dull.  He had so few parishioners that it is said he used to go down to the seashore and skiff stones in order to gather a congregation.  For he thought if the people would not come to hear sermons they would come at least to stare at the mad clergyman, and for years he was remembered as the “mad clergyman.”  And now because he found his freedom dull, and for various other reasons, when Sir William asked him to come back he gladly came.  This time he was much happier as a member of Sir William’s household than he had been before.