MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. 177 
back again and again to stick pins in sinners’ sides; 
stifle the babe that has been neglected by a harsh 
mother ; fling cattle which want tending into bogs which 
ought to have been drained; spoil milk which has been 
left by sluttish dairy-maids; and jabber, scoff, and 
torture men in the reflected images of their own wicked¬ 
ness. Why always in the night, amid 
The dark sublime of extra-natural scenes ? 
The vulgar magic’s puerile rite demeans; 
Where hags their cauldrons, fraught with toads, prepare. 
Or glide on broomsticks through the midnight air ?* 
Why, but that all evil spirits are but human vices riding 
on the broomsticks of memory, and compounding in the 
cauldron of remorse the toads and snakes of retribu¬ 
tion. The diseased mind peoples the night with hags 
and witches, and influences dire, as excuses—lame as 
they are—for its own wickedness and folly, which dare 
not face the daylight. 
Some strange old customs suggest themselves in con¬ 
nexion with broomsticks. There is the salutation of 
the broom, which, like the throwing of old shoes for 
luck, has a smack of poetry in it, and recals Arbuthnot’s 
remark on the brooming of servants, who, “if they 
came into the best apartment to set anything in order, 
were saluted with a broom.” The hanging out of the 
broom at the mast-heads of ships offered for sale origi¬ 
nated from that period of our history when the Dutch 
admiral, Van Tromp, with his fleet, appeared on our 
coasts in hostility against England; and to indicate that 
* Amwell Scott —On Painting. 
N 
