e, and fully predetermined in his mind
against all conviction.

"Not to disparage myself," said he, "by the comparison with such a
rascal, what art thou but a vagabond without house or home, without stock
or inheritance? born to no possession of your own, but a pair of wings
and a drone-pipe. Your livelihood is a universal plunder upon nature; a
freebooter over fields and gardens; and, for the sake of stealing, will
rob a nettle as easily as a violet. Whereas I am a domestic animal,
furnished with a native stock within myself. This large castle (to show
my improvements in the mathematics) is all built with my own hands, and
the materials extracted altogether out of my own person."

"I am glad," answered the bee, "to hear you grant at least that I am come
honestly by my wings and my voice; for then, it seems, I am obliged to
Heaven alone for my flights and my music; and Providence would never have
bestowed on me two such gifts without designing them for the noblest
ends. I visit, indeed, all the flowers and blossoms of the field and
garden, but whatever I collect thence enriches myself without the least
injury to their beauty, their smell, or their taste. Now, for you and
your skill in architecture and other mathematics, I have little to say:
in that building of yours there might, for aught I know, have been labour
and method enough; but, by woeful experience for us both, it is too plain
the materials are naught; and I hope you will henceforth take warning,
and consider duration and matter, as well as method and art. You boast,
indeed, of being obliged to no other creature, but of drawing and
spinning out all from yourself; that is to say, if we may judge of the
liquor in the vessel by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful
store of dirt and poison in your breast; and, though I would by no means
lesson or disparage your genuine stock of either, yet I doubt you are
somewhat obliged, for an increase of both, to a little foreign
assistance. Your inherent portion of dirt does not fall of acquisitions,
by sweepings exhaled from below; and one insect furnishes you with a
share of poison to destroy another. So that, in short, the question
comes all to this: whether is the nobler being of the two, that which, by
a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride,
feeding, and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom,
producing nothing at all but flybane and a cobweb; or that which,