The Silkworm and The Spider: A Silkworm was one day working at her shroud: the Spider, her neighbour, weaving her web with the greatest swiftness, looked down with insolent contempt on the slow, although beautiful, labours of the Silkworm. “What do you think of my web, my lady?” she cries; “see how large it is, and I began it only this morning, and here it is half finished, and is very fine and transparent. See and acknowledge that I work much quicker than you.” “Yes,” said the Silkworm, “but your labours, which are at first designed only as base traps to ensnare the harmless, are destroyed as soon as they are seen, and Swept away as dirt and worse than useless; whilst mine are preserved with the greatest care and in time become ornaments for princes.”
¶ The Bee and The Spider: The Bee and the Spider once entered into a warm debate which was the better artist. The Spider urged her skill in mathematics, and asserted that no one was half so well acquainted as herself with the construction of lines, angles, squares, and circles; that the web she daily wove was a specimen of art inimitable by any other creature in the universe; and, besides, that her work was derived from herself alone, the product of her own bowels; whereas the boasted honey of the Bee was stolen from every herb and flower of the field; nay, that she had obligations even to the meanest weeds. To this the Bee replied that she hoped the art of extracting honey even from the meanest weeds would at least have been allowed her as an excellence; and that as to her stealing sweets from the herbs and flowers of the field, her skill was there so conspicuous that no flower ever suffered the least diminution of its fragrance from so delicate an operation. Then, as to the Spider’s vaunted knowledge of the construction of lines and angles, she believed she might safely rest the merits of her cause on the regularity alone of her combs; but since she could add to this the sweetness and excellence of her honey, and the various purposes to which her wax was applied, she had nothing to fear from a comparison of her skill with that of the weaver of a flimsy cobweb: for the value of every art, she observed, is chiefly to be estimated by its use.
¶ Amelia and The Spider: The muslin torn, from tears of grief |
In vain Amelia sought relief;
In sighs and plaints she passed the day,
The tattered frock neglected lay:
While busied at the weaving trade,
A Spider heard the sighing maid,
And kindly stopping, in a trice,
Thus offered (gratis) her advice:
“Turn, little girl, behold in me |
A stimulus to industry;
Compare your woes, my dear, with mine,
Then tell me who should most repine;
This morning, ere you’d left your room,
The chambermaid’s relentless broom |
In one sad moment that destroyed |
To build which thousands were employed.
The shock was great, but as my life
I saved in the relentless strife,
I knew lamenting was in vain,
So patient went to work again;
By constant work a day or more,
My little mansion did restore.
And if each tear which you have shed |
Had been a needleful of thread,
If every sigh of sad despair |
Had been a stitch of proper care;
Closed would have been the luckless rent,
Nor thus the day have been misspent.
¶ The Fly In St. Paul’s Cupola: As a Fly was crawling leisurely up one of the columns of St. Paul’s Cupola, she often stopped, surveyed, examined, and at last broke forth into the following exclamation: “Strange, that any one who pretended to be an artist should leave so superb a structure with so many roughnesses unpolished!” “Ah, my friend,” said a very learned architect, who hung in his web under one of the capitals, “you should never decide of things beyond the extent of your capacity. This lofty building was not erected for such diminutive animals as you and I, but for a certain sort of creatures who are at least ten thousand times as large. To their eyes, it is very possible these columns may appear as smooth as to you appear the wings of your favourite mistress.” | AESOP 2026