Temple, conscious of having given reason for complaint, is said to have made him deputy-master of the rolls, in Ireland; which, according to his kinsman's account, was an office which he knew him not able to discharge. Swift, therefore, resolved to enter into the church, in which he had at first no higher hopes than of the chaplainship to the factory, at Lisbon; but being recommended to lord Capel, he obtained the prebend of Kilroot, in Connor, of about a hundred pounds a year. But the infirmities of Temple made a companion like Swift so necessary, that he invited him back, with a promise to procure him English preferment in exchange for the prebend, which he desired him to resign[95]. With this request Swift complied, having, perhaps, equally repented their separation, and they lived on together with mutual satisfaction; and, in the four years that passed between his return and Temple's death, it is probable that he wrote the Tale of a Tub, and the Battle of the Books. Swift began early to think, or to hope, that he was a poet, and wrote Pindarick odes to Temple, to the king, and to the Athenian society, a knot of obscure men[96], who published a periodical pamphlet of answers to questions, sent, or supposed to be sent, by letters. I have been told that Dryden, having perused these verses, said, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet;" and that this denunciation was the motive of Swift's perpetual malevolence to Dryden. In 1699 Temple died, and left a legacy with his manuscripts to Swift, for whom he had obtained, from king William, a promise of the first prebend that should be vacant at Westminster or Canterbury. That this promise might not be forgotten, Swift dedicated to the king the posthumous works with which he was intrusted; but neither the dedication, nor tenderness for the man whom he once had treated with confidence and fondness, revived in king William the remembrance of his promise. Swift awhile attended the court; but soon found his solicitations hopeless. He was then invited by the earl of Berkeley to accompany him into Ireland, as his private secretary; but, after having done the business till their arrival at Dublin, he then found that one Bush had persuaded the earl that a clergyman was not a proper secretary, and had obtained the office for himself. In a man like Swift, such circumvention and inconstancy must have excited violent indignation. But he had yet more to suffer. Lord Berkeley had the disposal of the deanery of Derry, and Swift expected to obtain it; but by the secretary's influence, supposed to have been secured by a bribe, it was bestowed on somebody else; and Swift was dismissed with the livings of Laracor and Rathbeggin, in the diocese of Meath, which together did not equal half the value of the deanery. At Laracor he increased the parochial duty by reading prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and performed all the offices of his profession with great decency and exactness.