hat
they have produced, you will hardly have countenance to bear you out in
boasting of either. Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as
you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your
own entrails (the guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at
last in a cobweb; the duration of which, like that of other spiders'
webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a
corner. For anything else of genuine that the Moderns may pretend to, I
cannot recollect; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much
of a nature and substance with the spiders' poison; which, however they
pretend to spit wholly out of themselves, is improved by the same arts,
by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age. As for us, the
Ancients, we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own
beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our
language. For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labour
and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference
is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to till our
hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of
things, which are sweetness and light."

It is wonderful to conceive the tumult arisen among the books upon the
close of this long descant of AEsop: both parties took the hint, and
heightened their animosities so on a sudden, that they resolved it should
come to a battle. Immediately the two main bodies withdrew, under their
several ensigns, to the farther parts of the library, and there entered
into cabals and consults upon the present emergency. The Moderns were in
very warm debates upon the choice of their leaders; and nothing less than
the fear impending from their enemies could have kept them from mutinies
upon this occasion. The difference was greatest among the horse, where
every private trooper pretended to the chief command, from Tasso and
Milton to Dryden and Wither. The light-horse were commanded by Cowley
and Despreaux. There came the bowmen under their valiant leaders,
Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes; whose strength was such that they could
shoot their arrows beyond the atmosphere, never to fall down again, but
turn, like that of Evander, into meteors; or, like the cannon-ball, into
stars. Paracelsus brought a squadron of stinkpot-flingers from the snowy
mountains of Rhaetia. There came a vast body of