Then, with the bread of this Temple charity irking his lusty manhood, he swears (he is overfond of swearing) that he will do for himself. So he tempestuously quits Moor Park and goes back to Ireland, where he takes orders, and has a little parish with a stipend of £100 a year. It is in a dismal country--looking east on the turbid Irish Sea, and west on bog-lands--no friends, no scholars, no poets, no diplomats, no Moor-Park gardens. Tired of this waste, and with new and better proposals from Temple--who misses his labors--Swift throws up his curacy (or whatever it may be) and turns again toward England. There is record of a certain early flurry of feeling at date of this departure from his first Irish parish--a tender, yet incisive, and tumultuous letter to one “Varina,”[110] for whom he promises to “forego all;” Varina, it would seem, discounted his imperious rapture, without wishing to cut off ulterior hopes. But ulteriors were never in the lexicon of Swift; and he broke away for his old cover at Moor Park. Sir William welcomes, almost with warmth, the returned secretary, who resumes old studies and duties, putting a fiercer appetite to his work, and a greater genius. Miss Hester is there to be guided, too; she sixteen, and he fairly turned among the thirties; she of an age to love moonlight in the Moor Park gardens, and he of an age--when do we have any other?--to love tender worship. But _The Battle of the Books_[111] and _The Tale of a Tub_, are even then seething and sweltering in his thought. They are wonderful products both; young people cannot warm to them as they do to the men of Liliput and of Brobdingnag; but there are old folk who love yet, in odd hours, to get their faculties stirred by contact with the flashing wit and tremendous satire of the books named. The _Battle_--rather a pamphlet than a book--deals with the antagonism, then noisy, between advocates of ancient and modern learning, to which Bentley, Wotton, and Temple were parties. Swift strikes off heads all round the arena, but inclines to the side of his patron, Temple; and in a wonderful figure, of wonderful pertinence, and with witty appointments, he likens the moderns to noisome spiders, spinning out of their own entrails the viscous “mathematical” net-work, which catches the vermin on which they feed; and contrasting these with the bees (ancients), who seek natural and purer sources of nutriment--storing “wax and honey,” which are the sources of the “light and sweetness of life.” There are horribly coarse streaks in this satire, as there are in _The Tale of a Tub_; but the wit is effulgent and trenchant.