Satire

The Battle of the Books

by Jonathan Swift

Swift wrote his account of a battle between the ancient books and the modern ones in the King’s Library at St James’s while he was secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, in the 1690s. Homer, Virgil and Aristotle take the field against Dryden, Descartes and the modern critics, and the bee and the spider argue the case between them. The manuscript breaks off in the middle of the fighting, so nobody has ever been declared the winner.

The librarian

Read it in the Library After Dark Or read it as plain text

Reading time

About 2 hr 40 min

Where to find it

Lilliput

Edition

Project Gutenberg, eBook #623. In the public domain in the United States.