Apart from two long visits to England in 1726 and 1727, Swift spent the rest of his life in Ireland, where he was publicly celebrated as the patriotic Drapier. He went to England in 1726 to publish Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, the work on which his English fame primarily rests, and to renew his friendships with his fellow Scriblerians, the community of wits he had left behind him a dozen years earlier. His long work on his ‘Travells’, his excited friends’ eager anticipation as news of his project gradually spread among them, and his elaborate plans to publish in England, not Ireland – everything reveals a confident writer expecting once more to capture the taste of the town. Swift had almost finished Travels when he turned his attention to the Drapier's Letters. In January 1724, shortly before he joined the campaign against Wood's pence, he told Ford that he had finished Book IV of Travels and started working on Book III, the last written: ‘I have left the Country of Horses, and am in the flying Island, where I shall not stay long, and my two last Journyes will be soon over’. After the Drapier's success, he returned to the task, completing it in August 1725: ‘I have finished my Travells, and I am now transcribing them; they are admirable Things, and will wonderfully mend the World’. He had invented a character more memorable even than the Drapier, although it was one less likely to be directly identified with the Dean than Bickerstaff or the Drapier. To the extent that Travels presents itself flatly as a travel narrative by one Lemuel Gulliver, ‘First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships’, it is a hoax that recalls his most playful early work, the Bickerstaff papers. Relishing this aspect of the book, Arbuthnot would pass on accounts of readers duped by it. Swift had also written an intensely political book. Travels grows out of the intense re-engagement with politics that produced the works in which Swift most directly confronted those in power, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture and the Drapier's Letters.