182 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
Illustrations may be drawn from a thousand sources 
to help out this meditation on a broomstick. It would 
not be too great a stretch of fancy to picture the Roman 
Eetiales carrying a broomstick in place of the caducous, 
and thence to make a disquisition on the Verbena and 
Saguina as kindred with the bonny broom. “ Kenealey 
Brallagan on the Dienosophists " would furnish an 
episode, and Wordsworth's quotations of the broom, in 
his adulation of Brougham, would give excuse for a 
chapter on the origin of Broom as an English surname. 
We could then retreat upon Hogg's lines of the “ Broom 
sae Green" and Aird's “Buy a Broom," without fear 
of wearying the reader. But even a broomstick must 
have an end; ours shall not end ingloriously, so this 
paper shall conclude with a reproduction {verb, et lit.) 
of a forgotten scrap of w r it from the pen of that master 
of satire, the immortal Dean Swift:— 
A Meditation upon a Broomstick, and Somewhat Beside; of the 
same Author’s. 
TJtili dulci. 
London : printed for F. Curll , at the Dial and Bible , against 
St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet Street; and sold by F. Harding , at 
the Fost Office^ in St. Martin's Lane. 1710. Price 6d. 
This single Stick, which you now behold Ingloriously lying in 
that neglected Corner, I once knew in a Flourishing State in A 
Forest, it was, full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs ; but 
now, in vain does the busie Art of Man pretend to Vye with Nature, 
by tying that wither’d Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: ’tis 
now at best but the Reverse of what it was, a Tree turn’d upside 
down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air; ’tis 
now handled by every Dirty Wench, condemned to do her Drudgery, 
and by a Capricious kind of Fate, destin’d to make other Things 
Clean and be Nasty itself: At Length worn to the Stumps in the 
