There he was associated with Esther Johnson, a poor relation of Temple's who later became the Stella who inspired his journal. Swift, through the influence of Temple, hoped to get political preferment, but though he wrote many pamphlets and a strong satire in verse, _The Tale of a Tub_, his hopes of office were disappointed. Finally he obtained a living at Laracor, in Meath, and there he preached several years, making frequent visits to London and Dublin. Like Defoe, Swift wrote English that was modern in its simplicity and directness. He never indulged in florid metaphor or concealed his thought under verbiage. Everything was clear, direct, incisive. While Defoe accepted failure frankly and remained untinged with bitterness, Swift seemed to store up venom after every defeat and every humiliation, and this poison he injected into his writings. Although a priest of the church, he divided his attentions for years between Stella, the woman he first met at Sir William Temple's, and Vanessa, a young woman of Dublin. He was reported to have secretly married Stella in 1716, but there is no record of the marriage. Seven years later he broke off all relations with Vanessa because she wrote to Stella asking her if she were married to Swift, and this rupture brought on the woman's death. Stella's death followed soon after, and the closing years of Swift were clouded with remorse and fear of insanity. [Illistration (with text): TRAVELS INTO SEVERAL Remote Nations OF THE WORLD. In FOUR PARTS. By _LEMUEL GULLIVER_, First a SURGEON, and then a CAPTAIN of several SHIPS. VOL. I. _LONDON:_ _Printed for_ BENJ. MOTTE, _at the Middle_ Temple-Gate _in_ Fleet-Street. MDCCXXVI. FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF "GULLIVER'S TRAVELS" ISSUED IN 1726, WHICH SCORED AS GREAT A POPULAR SUCCESS AS DEFOE'S "ROBINSON CRUSOE"] In _Gulliver's Travels_ Swift wrote several stories of the adventures of an Englishman who was cast away on the shores of Lilliput, a country whose people were only six inches tall; then upon Brobdingnag, a land inhabited by giants sixty feet high; then upon Laputa, a flying island, and finally upon the land of the Houyhnhnms, where the horse rules and man is represented by a degenerate creature known as a Yahoo, who serves the horse as a slave. In the first two stories Gulliver's satire is amusing, but the picture of the old people in Laputa who cannot die and of the Yahoos, who have every detestable vice, are so bitter that they repel any except morbid readers. Yet the style never lacks clearness, simplicity and force, and one feels in reading these tales that he is listening to the voice of a master of the English tongue. _Bibliography_ _Notes on the Historical and Best Reading Editions of Great Authors._