by a
universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and
distinction of things, brings home honey and wax."

This dispute was managed with such eagerness, clamour, and warmth, that
the two parties of books, in arms below, stood silent a while, waiting in
suspense what would be the issue; which was not long undetermined: for
the bee, grown impatient at so much loss of time, fled straight away to a
bed of roses, without looking for a reply, and left the spider, like an
orator, collected in himself, and just prepared to burst out.

It happened upon this emergency that AEsop broke silence first. He had
been of late most barbarously treated by a strange effect of the regent's
humanity, who had torn off his title-page, sorely defaced one half of his
leaves, and chained him fast among a shelf of Moderns. Where, soon
discovering how high the quarrel was likely to proceed, he tried all his
arts, and turned himself to a thousand forms. At length, in the borrowed
shape of an ass, the regent mistook him for a Modern; by which means he
had time and opportunity to escape to the Ancients, just when the spider
and the bee were entering into their contest; to which he gave his
attention with a world of pleasure, and, when it was ended, swore in the
loudest key that in all his life he had never known two cases, so
parallel and adapt to each other as that in the window and this upon the
shelves. "The disputants," said he, "have admirably managed the dispute
between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to be said
on both sides, and exhausted the substance of every argument _pro_ and
_con_. It is but to adjust the reasonings of both to the present
quarrel, then to compare and apply the labours and fruits of each, as the
bee has learnedly deduced them, and we shall find the conclusion fall
plain and close upon the Moderns and us. For pray, gentlemen, was ever
anything so modern as the spider in his air, his turns, and his
paradoxes? he argues in the behalf of you, his brethren, and himself,
with many boastings of his native stock and great genius; that he spins
and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any obligation or
assistance from without. Then he displays to you his great skill in
architecture and improvement in the mathematics. To all this the bee, as
an advocate retained by us, the Ancients, thinks fit to answer, that, if
one may judge of the great genius or inventions of the Moderns by w