troops together, resolving to act upon the defensive; upon which,
several of the Moderns fled over to their party, and among the rest
Temple himself. This Temple, having been educated and long
conversed among the Ancients, was, of all the Moderns, their
greatest favourite, and became their greatest champion.
Things were at this crisis when a material accident fell out. For
upon the highest corner of a large window, there dwelt a certain
spider, swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of
infinite numbers of flies, whose spoils lay scattered before the
gates of his palace, like human bones before the cave of some
giant. The avenues to his castle were guarded with turnpikes and
palisadoes, all after the modern way of fortification. After you
had passed several courts you came to the centre, wherein you might
behold the constable himself in his own lodgings, which had windows
fronting to each avenue, and ports to sally out upon all occasions
of prey or defence. In this mansion he had for some time dwelt in
peace and plenty, without danger to his person by swallows from
above, or to his palace by brooms from below; when it was the
pleasure of fortune to conduct thither a wandering bee, to whose
curiosity a broken pane in the glass had discovered itself, and in
he went, where, expatiating a while, he at last happened to alight
upon one of the outward walls of the spider's citadel; which,
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yielding to the unequal weight, sunk down to the very foundation.
Thrice he endeavoured to force his passage, and thrice the centre
shook. The spider within, feeling the terrible convulsion,
supposed at first that nature was approaching to her final
dissolution, or else that Beelzebub, with all his legions, was come
to revenge the death of many thousands of his subjects whom his
enemy had slain and devoured. However, he at length valiantly
resolved to issue forth and meet his fate. Meanwhile the bee had
acquitted himself of his toils, and, posted securely at some
distance, was employed in cleansing his wings, and disengaging them
from the ragged remnants of the cobweb. By this time the spider
was adventured out, when, beholding the chasms, the ruins, and
dilapidations of his fortress, he was very near at his wit's end;
he stormed and swore like a madman, and swelled till he was ready
to burst. At length, casting his eye upon the bee, and wisely
gathering causes from events (for they know each other by sight),
"A plague split you," said he; "is it you, with a vengeance, that
have made this litter here; could not you look before you, and be
d-d? Do you think I have nothing else to do (in the devil's name)
but to mend and repair after you?" "Good words, friend," said the
bee, having now pruned himself, and being disposed to droll; "I'll
give you my hand and word to come near your kennel no more; I was
never in such a confounded pickle since I was born." "Sirrah,"
replied the spider, "if it were not for breaking an old custom in
our family, never to stir abroad against an enemy, I should come
and teach you better manners." "I pray have patience," said the
bee, "or you'll spend your substance, and, for aught I see, you may
stand in need of it all, towards the repair of your house."
"Rogue, rogue," replied the spider, "yet methinks you should have
more respect to a person whom all the world allows to be so much
your betters." "By my troth," said the bee, "the comparison will
amount to a very good jest, and you will do me a favour to let me
know the reasons that all the world is pleased to use in so hopeful
a dispute." At this the spider, having swelled himself into the
size and posture of a disputant, began his argument in the true
spirit of controversy, with resolution to be heartily scurrilous
and angry, to urge on his own reasons without the least regard to
the answers or objections of his opposite, 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
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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, 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
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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 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 (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 dragoons, of different nations, under the leading of
Harvey, their great aga: part armed with scythes, the weapons of
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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 without report. There came several
bodies of heavy-armed foot, all mercenaries, under the ensigns of
Guicciardini, Davila, Polydore Vergil, Buchanan, Mariana, Camden,
and others. The engineers were commanded by Regiomontanus and
Wilkins. The rest was a confused multitude, led by Scotus,
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.
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.
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, called books, wherein the celestial interest was but too
deeply concerned. Momus, the patron of the Moderns, made an
excellent speech in their favour, which was answered by Pallas, the
protectress of the Ancients. The assembly was divided in their
affections; when Jup
iter commanded the Book of 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
pass almost for vellum. 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: those are his
ministering instruments in all affairs below. 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 they whisper to each other through a large
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 library, and
consulting a few minutes, entered unseen, and disposed the parties
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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 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 devoured. 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, hoodwinked,
and head-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 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 excrescences in form of teats, at
which a crew of ugly monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is
wonderful to 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 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 answer, but
left the goddess to her own resentment. Up she rose in a rage,
and, as it is the form on such occasions, began a soliloquy: "It
is 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 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
their estate, before it comes into their hands. It is I who have
deposed wit and knowledge from their empire over poetry, and
advanced myself in their stead. And shall a few upstart Ancients
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