us.

find the conclusion fall plain and close upon the Moderns and 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 5 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 10 judge of the great genius or inventions of the Moderns by what 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, 15

. . 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 20 and satire, much of a nature and substance with the spider's 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 25 beyond our wings and our voice, that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got hath been by infinite labor and search and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison we have rather chose to fill our hives with honey and wax, 30 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 Æsop: both parties took the hint, and heightened their animosities so on a 35 sudden that they resolved it should come to a battle. Immediately the two main bodies withdrew, under their several ensigns, to the farthest parts of the library, and there entered

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The

into cabals and consults upon the present emergency. 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 occa5 sion. 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 10 Hobbes, whose strength was such that they could shoot their arrows behind 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 stink-potflingers from the snowy mountains of Rhætia. There came a 15 vast body of dragoons, of different nations, under the leading of Harvey, their great aga: part armed with scythes, the weapons of death; part with lances and long knives, all steeped in poison; part shot bullets of a most malignant nature, and used white powder, which infallibly killed with20 out report. There came several bodies of heavy-armed foot, all mercenaries, under the ensigns of Guicciardini, Davila, Polydore Virgil, Buchanan, Mariana, Camden, and others. The engineers were commanded by Regiomontanus and Wilkins. The rest were a confused multitude, led by Scotus, 25 Aquinas, and Bellarmine; of mighty bulk and stature, but without either arms, courage, or discipline. In the last place came infinite swarms of calones, a disorderly rout led by L'Estrange; rogues and ragamuffins, that follow the camp for nothing but the plunder, all without coats to cover them. 30 The army of the Ancients was much fewer in number. Homer led the horse, and Pindar the light-horse; Euclid was chief engineer; Plato and Aristotle commanded the bowmen, Herodotus and Livy the foot, Hippocrates the dragoons; the allies, led by Vossius and Temple, brought up the rear. 35 All things violently tending to a decisive battle, Fame, who much frequented and had a large apartment formerly assigned her in the regal library, fled up straight to Jupiter, to whom she delivered a faithful account of all that passed

between the two parties below (for among the gods she always tells truth). Jove, in great concern, convokes a council in the Milky Way. The senate assembled, he declares the occasion of convening them—a bloody battle just impendent between two mighty armies of Ancient and Modern creatures, 5 called books, wherein the celestial interest was but too deeply concerned. Momus, the patron of the Moderns, made an excellent speech in their favor, which was answered by Pallas, the protectress of the Ancients. The assembly was divided in their affections; when Jupiter commanded the Book of 10 Fate to be laid before him. Immediately were brought by Mercury three large volumes in folio, containing memoirs of all things past, present, and to come. The clasps were of silver double gilt, the covers of celestial turkey-leather, and the paper such as here on earth might almost pass for vellum. 15 Jupiter, having silently read the decree, would communicate the import to none, but presently shut up the book.

Without the doors of this assembly there attended a vast number of light, nimble gods, menial servants to Jupiter: these are his ministering instruments in all affairs below. 20 They travel in a caravan, more or less together, and are fastened to each other, like a link of galley-slaves, by a light chain, which passes from them to Jupiter's great toe; and yet, in receiving or delivering a message, they may never approach above the lowest step of his throne, where he and 25 they whisper to each other through a long hollow trunk. These deities are called by mortal men accidents or events; but the gods call them second causes. Jupiter having delivered his message to a certain number of these divinities, they flew immediately down to the pinnacle of the regal 30 library, and, consulting a few minutes, entered unseen, and disposed the parties according to their orders.

Meanwhile Momus, fearing the worst, and calling to mind an ancient prophecy which bore no very good face to his children the Moderns, bent his flight to the region of a malignant 35 deity called Criticism. She dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus found her extended in her den, upon the spoils of numberless volumes, half de

voured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hood-winked, and head5 strong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners. The goddess herself had claws like a cat; her head and ears and voice resembled those of an ass; her teeth fallen out before, her eyes 10 turned inward, as if she looked only upon herself; her diet was the overflowing of her own gall; her spleen was so large as to stand prominent, like a dug of the first rate, nor wanted excrescencies in the form of teats, at which a crew of ugly monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful to 15 conceive, the bulk of spleen increased faster than the sucking could diminish it. "Goddess," said Momus, "can you sit idly here while our devout worshippers, the Moderns, are this minute entering into a cruel battle, and perhaps now lying under the swords of their enemies? Who, then, hereafter will 20 ever sacrifice, or build altars, to our divinities? Haste, therefore, to the British Isle, and if possible prevent their destruction; while I make factions among the gods, and gain them over to our party.”

Momus, having thus delivered himself, stayed not for an 25 answer, but left the goddess to her own resentments. Up she rose in a rage, and, as it is the form upon such occasions, began a soliloquy: ""Tis I," said she, "who give wisdom to infants and idiots; by me children grow wiser than their parents; by me beaux become politicians, and schoolboys 30 judges of philosophy; by me sophisters debate, and conclude upon the depths of knowledge; and coffee-house wits, instinct by me, can correct an author's style and display his minutest errors, without understanding a syllable of his matter or his language; by me striplings spend their judgment, as they do 35 their estate, before it comes into their hands. 'Tis I who have deposed Wit and Knowledge from their empire over poetry, and advanced myself in their stead. And shall a few upstart Ancients dare oppose me?-But come, my aged

parents, and you, my children dear, and thou, my beauteous sister; let us ascend my chariot, and haste to assist our devout Moderns, who are now sacrificing to us a hecatomb, as I perceive by that grateful smell which from thence reaches my nostrils."

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The goddess and her train, having mounted the chariot, which was drawn by tame geese, flew over infinite regions, shedding her influence in due places, till at length she arrived at her beloved island of Britain; but in hovering over its metropolis what blessings did she not let fall upon her sem- 10 inaries of Gresham and Covent Garden! And now she reached the fatal plain of St. James's Library, at what time the two armies were upon the point to engage; where, entering with all her caravan unseen, and landing upon a case of shelves, now desert but once inhabited by a colony of vir- 15 tuosos, she stayed awhile to observe the posture of both armies.

But here the tender cares of a mother began to fill her thoughts and move in her breast; for at the head of a troop of Modern bowmen she cast her eyes upon her son Wotton, to whom the Fates had assigned a very short thread. Wotton, 20 a young hero, whom an unknown father of mortal race begot by stolen embraces with this goddess. He was the darling of his mother above all her children, and she resolved to go and comfort him. But first, according to the good old custom of deities, she cast about to change her shape, for fear 25 the divinity of her countenance might dazzle his mortal sight and overcharge the rest of his senses. She therefore gathered up her person into an octavo compass; her body grew white and arid, and split in pieces with dryness; the thick turned into pasteboard, and the thin into paper, upon which her 30 parents and children artfully strewed a black juice, or decoction of gall and soot, in form of letters; her head and voice and spleen kept their primitive form; and that which before was a cover of skin did still continue so. In which guise she marched on towards the Moderns, undistinguishable in shape 35 and dress from the divine Bentley, Wotton's dearest friend. "Brave Wotton," said the goddess, "why do our troops stand idle here, to spend their present vigor and opportunity of the