But the Bull will play the man.
(W. Turner’s Common Cries of London Town, 1662.)
“Broom” is Richard Brome (died 1652), whose racy comedies have been, like Dekker’s, lately reprinted. The insinuation that Ben Jonson had “sent him before to sweep the way,” alludes, no doubt, to the fact of Brome having earlier been Jonson’s servant, and learning from his personal discourse much of dramatic art. Neither was it meant nor accepted as an insult, when, (printed 1632,) Jonson wrote (“according to Ben’s own nature and custom, magisterial enough,” as their true friend Alexander Brome admits),
I had you for a Servant once, Dick Brome;
And you perform’d a Servant’s faithful parts:
Now, you are got into a nearer room
Of Fellowship, professing my old Arts.
And you do doe them well, with good applause,
Which you have justly gained from the Stage, &c.
It is amusing to mark the survival of the old joke in our text, about sweeping (it came often enough, in Figaro in London, &c., at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, as to Henry Brougham and Vaux); when we see it repeated, almost literally, in reference to Alexander Pope’s fellow-labourer on the Odyssey translation, the Rev. William Broome, of our St. John’s College, Cambridge:—