and heart; however, some few, by trading among the Ancients, had
furnished themselves tolerably enough.

While things were in this ferment, discord grew extremely high; hot
words passed on both sides, and ill blood was plentifully bred.
Here a solitary Ancient, squeezed up among a whole shelf of
Moderns, offered fairly to dispute the case, and to prove by
manifest reason that the priority was due to them from long
possession, and in regard of their prudence, antiquity, and, above
all, their great merits toward the Moderns. But these denied the
premises, and seemed very much to wonder how the Ancients could
pretend to insist upon their antiquity, when it was so plain (if
they went to that) that the Moderns were much the more ancient of
the two. As for any obligations they owed to the Ancients, they
renounced them all. "It is true," said they, "we are informed some
few of our party have been so mean as to borrow their subsistence
from you, but the rest, infinitely the greater number (and
especially we French and English), were so far from stooping to so
base an example, that there never passed, till this very hour, six
words between us. For our horses were of our own breeding, our
arms of our own forging, and our clothes of our own cutting out and
sewing." Plato was by chance up on the next shelf, and observing
those that spoke to be in the ragged plight mentioned a while ago,
their jades lean and foundered, their weapons of rotten wood, their
armour rusty, and nothing but rags underneath, he laughed loud, and
in his pleasant way swore, by -, he believed them.

Now, the Moderns had not proceeded in their late negotiation with
secrecy enough to escape the notice of the enemy. For those
advocates who had begun the quarrel, by setting first on foot the