Swift at Dublin recalls Napoleon at Elba. The duties of a deanery are not supposed, I believe, to give absorbing employment for all the faculties of the incumbent; but an empire, however small, may be governed; and Swift at an early period set about establishing his supremacy within his small domains. He maintained his prerogatives against the archbishop, and subdued his chapter. His inferiors submitted, and could not fail to recognize his zeal for the honour of the body. But his superiors found him less amenable. He encountered episcopal authority with his old haughtiness. He bade an encroaching bishop remember that he was speaking "to a clergyman, and not to a footman."[81] He fell upon an old friend, Sterne, the Bishop of Clogher, for granting a lease to some "old fanatic knight." He takes the opportunity of reviling the bishops for favouring "two abominable bills for beggaring and enslaving the clergy (which took their birth from hell)," and says that he had thereupon resolved to have "no more commerce with persons of such prodigious grandeur, who, I feared, in a little time, would expect me to kiss their slipper."[82] He would not even look into a coach, lest he should see such a thing as a bishop--a sight that would strike him with terror. In a bitter satire he describes Satan as the bishop to whom the rest of the Irish bench are suffragans. His theory was that the English Government always appointed admirable divines, but that unluckily all the new bishops were murdered on Hounslow Heath by highwaymen, who took their robes and patents, and so usurped the Irish sees. It is not surprising that Swift's episcopal acquaintance was limited.
In his deanery Swift discharged his duties with despotic benevolence. He performed the services, carefully criticized young preachers, got his musical friends to help him in regulating his choir, looked carefully after the cathedral repairs, and improved the revenues at the cost of his own interests. His pugnacity broke out repeatedly even in such apparently safe directions. He erected a monument to the Duke of Schomberg after an attempt to make the duke's descendants pay for it themselves. He said that if they tried to avoid the duty by reclaiming the body, he would take up the bones, and put the skeleton "in his register office, to be a memorial of their baseness to all posterity."[83] He finally relieved his feelings by an epitaph, which is a bitter taunt against the duke's relations.