Swift was thirty-one, too old to be beginning his career, yet young enough to turn with eager zest to the unknown, when this catastrophe occurred. Sir William Temple’s secretary and literary executor must have known, one would suppose, many people who could have helped him to promotion, but it would seem as if a kind of irresistible fate impelled him back to his native country, though he did not love it, and forced him to be an Irishman in spite of himself. The only post that came in his way was a chaplaincy, conjoined with a secretaryship, in the suite of the Earl of Berkeley, newly appointed one of the lords justices in Ireland, and just then entering upon his duties. Swift accepted the position in hopes that he should be continued as Lord Berkeley’s secretary, and possibly go with him afterward to more stirring scenes and a larger life, but this expectation was not carried out. Neither was his application--which seems at the moment a somewhat bold one--for the deanery of Derry successful, and all the preferment he succeeded in getting was another Irish living, with a better stipend and in a more favorable position than Kilroot: the parish of Laracor, within twenty miles of Dublin, which, conjoined with a prebend in St. Patrick’s and other small additions, brought him in £200 a year; a small promotion, indeed, yet not a bad income for the place and time. And he was naturally, as Lord Berkeley’s chaplain, in the midst of the finest company that Ireland could boast, one of a court more extended than Sir William Temple’s, yet of a similar description, and affording greater scope for his hitherto undeveloped social qualities. Satire more sportive than mere scorn, yet sometimes savage enough; an elephantine fun, which pleased the age; the puns and quibs in which the men emulated one another; the merry rhymes that pleased the ladies,--seem suddenly to have burst forth in him, throwing an unexpected gleam upon his new sphere. Swift was always popular with women. He treated them roughly on many occasions, with an arrogance that grew with age, but evidently possessed that charm--a quality by itself and not dependent upon any laws of amiability--which attracts one sex to the other. Lady Berkeley, whom he describes as a woman of “the most easy conversation joined with the truest piety,” and her young daughters were charming and lively companions with whom the chaplain soon found himself at home. And notwithstanding his disappointment with respect to the preferment which Lord Berkeley might have procured for him and did not, it would seem that this period of hanging on at the little Irish court was amusing at least. The lively little picture of the inferior members of a great household which Swift made for the entertainment of the drawing-rooms on the occasion when Mrs. Frances Harris lost her purse, is one of the most vivid and amusing possible.