A classic piece of parody from the great Anglo-Irish satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift. The particular butt of Swift's sharp pen in this instance was Robert Boyle and his Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665), in which various everyday subjects (mirrors, fruit-trees, fish) were likened to religious themes - man's relationship to God, man's relationship to his soul, etc. Swift came across the book during his stay in the household of William Temple, for whom he was employed as a secretary. The book was supposedly very popular in the Temple household and Swift would often read aloud from it to an audience of ladies. However, becoming bored with the predictability of Boyle's points, Swift penned his own Meditation ("upon a broomstick") and inserted it into the Temple's copy. Legend has it that, when it came round to Swift's next recital from the book, instead of reading Boyle's words he read his own musings upon the broomstick, his audience not catching on until the rather absurd frantic finale in which Boyle's kindly tone is replaced with a misanthropistic note of despair and nihilism. Originally penned in 1701, the piece went for many years unpublished until the controversial bookseller and publisher Edmund Curll (the scorn of many of London's literati at the time) published it in 1710 from a manuscript stolen from Swift. This in turn forced Swift to publish a corrected and authorised version (that he apparently had to write from memory). The copy featured above is from an anthology of Swift's works from 1801. You can see the three subtly varying versions <a href="http://jonathanswiftarchive.org.uk/search/work.html#q=work-title:*&fq=work-title:"Meditation upon a Broomstick"&p=1" target="_blank">here at the Jonathan Swift Archive. Below, the earliest published authorised version from 1711.