In this latter book there is war on all pedantries again; but mostly on shams in ecclesiastic teachings and habitudes; Swift finding (as so many of us do) all the shams, in practices which are not his own. It is a mad, strange, often foul-mouthed book, with thrusts in it that go to the very marrow of all monstrous practices in all ecclesiasticisms; showing a love for what is honest and of good report, perhaps; but showing stronger love for thwacking the skulls of all sinners in high places; and the higher the place the harder is the thwack. Not long after these things were a-brewing, Sir William Temple died (1699), bequeathing his papers to his secretary. Swift looked for more. So many wasted years! Want of money always irked him. But he goes to London to see after the publication of Temple’s papers. He has an interview with King William--then in his last days--to whom Temple had commended him, but no good comes of that. He does, however, get place as chaplain for Lord Berkeley; goes to Ireland with him; reads good books to Lady Berkeley--among them the _Occasional Reflections of the Hon. Robert Boyle_, of whose long sentences I gave a taste in an earlier chapter. Some of these Boyle meditations were on the drollest of topics--as, for instance, “Upon the Sight of a Windmill Standing Still,” and again, “Upon the Paring of a rare Summer Apple.” Swift had no great appetite for such “parings;” but Lady Berkeley being insatiate, he slips a meditation of his own, in manuscript, between the leaves of the great folio of the Hon. Mr. Boyle; and opening to the very place begins reading, for her edification, “Meditations on a Broomstick.” “Dear me!” says her ladyship, “what a strange subject! But there is no knowing what useful instructions this wonderful man may draw from topics the most trivial. Pray, read on, Mr. Swift.” And he did. He was not a man given to smiles when a joke was smouldering; and he went through his meditation with as much unction as if the Hon. Robert had written it. The good lady kept her eyes reverently turned up, and never smacked the joke until it came out in full family conclave. I have told this old story (which, like most good stories, some critics count apocryphal) because it is so like Swift; he had such keen sense of the ridiculous, that he ran like a hound in quest of it--having not only a hound’s scent but a hound’s teeth. At Laracor, the little Irish parish which he came by shortly after, he had a glebe and a horse, and became in a way domesticated there, so far as such a man could be domesticated anywhere. He duplicated, after a fashion, some features of the Moor-Park gardens; he wrote sermons there which are surprisingly good.