In the winter of 1713-14 Swift joined the Scriblerus Club, an association of such wits as Pope, Parnell, Arbuthnot, and Gay, and it was about this time that his friendship with Pope began. The members proposed writing a satire between them, and when Swift was exiled to Dublin as Dean of St. Patrick's, he pursued indirectly the suggestion of the Scriblerus wits by writing _Gulliver's Travels_ (1726), a book that has made his name known throughout Europe, and in all the lands where English literature is read. Although Swift did not hesitate to make use of hints and descriptions which he had met with in the course of his reading, this is one of the most original works of fiction ever written, and one of the wittiest. Yet like almost everything that Swift wrote, it is deformed by grossness of expression, and in the latter portion by a malignant contempt for human nature which betrays a diseased imagination. The stories of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnags, purified from coarse allusions, are the delight of children; but the description of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos excites disgust and indignation. He said that his object in writing the satire was to vex the world, and he has succeeded. 'It cannot be denied,' says Sir Walter Scott, one of the sanest and healthiest of imaginative writers, 'that even a moral purpose will not justify the nakedness with which Swift has sketched this horrible outline of mankind degraded to a bestial state; since a moralist ought to hold with the Romans that crimes of atrocity should be exposed when punished, but those of flagitious impurity concealed. In point of probability, too--for there are degrees of probability, proper even to the wildest fiction--the fourth part of _Gulliver_ is inferior to the three others.... The mind rejects, as utterly impossible, the supposition of a nation of horses, placed in houses which they could not build, fed with corn which they could neither sow, reap, nor save, possessing cows which they could not milk, depositing that milk in vessels which they could not make, and, in short, performing a hundred purposes of rational and social life for which their external structure altogether unfits them.'[46] Neither morality, nor a regard for probability are so outraged in the story of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnags.