Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/95

 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 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 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 chose to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light."

'Tis wonderful to conceive the tumult arisen among the books upon the close of this long descant of Æsop.