Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/78

called the Ancients, and the other was held by the Moderns. But these, disliking their present station, sent certain ambassadors to the Ancients, complaining of a great nuisance—how the height of that part of Parnassus quite spoiled the prospect of theirs, especially towards the East; and therefore, to avoid a war, offered them the choice of this alternative: either that the Ancients would please to remove themselves and their effects down to the lower summity, which the Moderns would graciously surrender to them, and advance in their place; or else that the said Ancients will give leave to the Moderns to come with shovels and mattocks, and level the said hill as low as they shall think it convenient. To which the Ancients made answer how little they expected such a message as this from a colony whom they had admitted, out of their own free grace, to so near a neighbourhood: that, as to their own seat, they were aborigines of it, and therefore to talk with them of a removal or surrender was a language they did not understand: that if the height of the hill on their side shortened the prospect of the Moderns, it was a disadvantage they could not help, but desired them to consider whether