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
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,