Four years, however, is a long time for an ambitious young man to spend in dependence, watching one hope die out after another; and Swift’s impatience began to be irrestrainable and to trouble the peace of his patron’s learned leisure. Although destined from the first to the church, and for some time waiting in tremulous expectation of ecclesiastical preferment, Swift had not yet taken orders. The explanation he gives of how and why he finally determined on doing so is characteristic. His dissatisfaction and restlessness, probably his complaints, moved Sir William,--though evidently deeply offended that his secretary should wish to leave him,--to offer him an employ of about £120 a year in the Rolls Office in Ireland, of which Temple held the sinecure office of master. “Whereupon [says Swift’s own narrative] Mr. Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the Church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take Holy Orders.” This arbitrary decision to balk his patron’s tardy bounty, and take his own way in spite of him, was probably as much owing to a characteristic blaze of temper as to the somewhat fantastic disinterestedness here put forward, though Swift was never a man greedy of money or disposed to sacrifice his pride to the acquisition of gain, notwithstanding certain habits of miserliness afterward developed in his character. Sir William was “extremely angry”--hurt, no doubt, as many a patron has been, by the ingratitude of the dependent who would not trust everything to him, but claimed some free will in the disposition of his own life. Had they been uncle and nephew, or even father and son, the same thing might easily have happened. Swift set out for Dublin full of indignation and excitement, “everybody judging I did best to leave him,”--but alas! in this, as in so many cases, pride was doomed to speedy downfall.