Swift came to Temple's house as a raw student. He left it as the author of one of the most remarkable satires ever written. His first efforts had been unpromising enough. Certain _Pindaric Odes_, in which the youthful aspirant imitated the still popular model of Cowley, are even comically prosaic. The last of them, dated 1691, is addressed to a queer Athenian Society, promoted by a John Dunton, a speculative bookseller, whose _Life and Errors_ is still worth a glance from the curious. The Athenian Society was the name of John Dunton himself, and two or three collaborators who professed in the _Athenian Mercury_ to answer queries ranging over the whole field of human knowledge. Temple was one of their patrons, and Swift sent them a panegyrical ode, the merits of which are sufficiently summed up by Dryden's pithy criticism--"Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet." Swift disliked and abused Dryden ever afterwards, though he may have had better reasons for his enmity than the child's dislike to bitter medicine. Later poems, the _Epistle to Congreve_ and that to Temple already quoted, show symptoms of growing power and a clearer self-recognition. In Swift's last residence with Temple, he proved unmistakably that he had learnt the secret often so slowly revealed to great writers, the secret of his real strength. The _Tale of a Tub_ was written about 1696; part of it appears to have been seen at Kilroot by his friend, Waring, Varina's brother; the _Battle of the Books_ was written in 1697. It is a curious proof of Swift's indifference to a literary reputation that both works remained in manuscript till 1704. The "little parson cousin" Tom Swift, ventured some kind of claim to a share in the authorship of the _Tale of a Tub_. Swift treated this claim with the utmost contempt, but never explicitly claimed for himself the authorship of what some readers hold to be his most powerful work.