D rise in them at the sight of a man who lived p

[Fernstrom Lemkau]

 and thence sent down in cargoes to be scattered at elections. IV A
MEDITATION UPON A BROOMSTICK[113] 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 busy art of man pretend to vie
with nature, by tying that withered bundle of twigs to its sapless
trunk; it is now at best but the reverse of what it was, a tree turned
upside down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air; it is
now handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and, by
a capricious kind of fate, destined to make other things clean, and be
nasty itself; at length, worn to the stumps in the service of the maids,
it is either thrown out-of-doors, or condemned to the last use of
kindling a fire. When I beheld this I sighed, and said within myself,
"Surely mortal man is a broomstick!" Nature sent him into the world
strong and lusty, in a thriving condition, wearing his own hair on his
head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, till the ax of
intemperance has lopped off his green boughs, and left him a withered
trunk; he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon
an unnatural bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew
on his head; but now should this our broomstick pretend to enter the
scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with
dust, through the sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be
apt to ridicule and despise its vanity. Partial judges that we are of
our own excellences, and other men's defaults! But a broomstick, perhaps
you will say, is an emblem of a tree standing on its head; and pray what
is a man but a topsy-turvy creature, his animal faculties perpetually
mounted on his rational, his head where his heels should be, groveling
on the earth? And yet, with all his faults, he sets up to be a universal
reformer and corrector of abuses, 
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