The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton | Page 4

is pleasant reading.
In 1592, doubtless prior to the death of Greene, Nash published the earliest of his important books, the volume entitled "Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil." This is a grotesque satire on the vices and the eccentricities of the age. As a specimen of prose style it is remarkable for its spirit and "go," qualities which may enable us to forget how turbid, ungraceful, and harsh it is. Nash had now dropped the mannerism of the Euphuists; he had hardly gained a style of his own. "Pierce Penniless," with its chains of "letter-leaping metaphors," rattles breathlessly on, and at length abruptly ceases. Any sense of the artistic fashioning of a sentence, or of the relative harmony of the parts of a composition, was not yet dreamed of. But before we condemn the muddy turbulence of the author, we must recollect that nothing had then been published of Hooker, Raleigh, or Bacon in the pedestrian manner. Genuine English prose had begun to exist indeed, but had not yet been revealed to the world. Nash, as a lively portrait-painter in grotesque, at this time, is seen at his best in such a caricature as this, scourging "the pride of the Dane":--
"The most gross and senseless proud dolts are the Danes, who stand so much upon their unwieldy burly-boned soldiery, that they account of no man that hath not a battle-axe at his girdle to hough dogs with, or wears not a cock's feather in a thrummed hat like a cavalier. Briefly, he is the best fool braggart under heaven. For besides nature hath lent him a flab-berkin face, like one of the four winds, and cheeks that sag like a woman's dug over his chinbone, his apparel is so stuffed up with bladders of taffaty, and his back like beef stuffed with parsley, so drawn out with ribbands and devises, and blistered with light sarcenet bastings, that you would think him nothing but a swarm of butterflies, if you saw him afar off."
On the 3rd of September, 1592, Greene came to his miserable end, having sent to the press from his deathbed those two remarkable pamphlets, the "Groatsworth of Wit" and the "Repentance." For two years past, if we may believe Nash, the profligate atheism of the elder poet had estranged his friend, or at all events had kept him at a distance. But a feeling of common loyalty, and the anger which a true man of letters feels when a genuine poet is traduced by a pedant, led Nash to take up a very strong position as a defender of the reputation of Greene. Gabriel Harvey, although the friend of Spenser, is a personage who fills an odious place in the literary history of the last years of Elizabeth. He was a scholar and a university man of considerable attainments, but he was wholly without taste, and he concentrated into vinegar a temper which must always have had a tendency to be sour. In particular, he loathed the school of young writers who had become famous in direct opposition to the literary laws which he had laid down.
Harvey's wrath had found a definite excuse in the tract, called "A Quip for an upstart Courtier, or a quaint dispute between Velvet-Breeches and Cloth-Breeches," which Greene had published early in the year 1592. Accordingly, when he heard of Greene's death, he hastened to his lodgings, interviewed his landlady, collected scurrilous details, and, with matchless bad taste, issued, before the month was over, his "Four Letters," a pamphlet in which he trampled upon the memory of Greene. In the latest of his public utterances, Greene had made an appeal to three friends, who, though not actually named, are understood to have been Marlowe, Peele, and Nash.
Of these, the last was the one with the readiest pen, and the task of punishing Harvey fell upon him.
Nash's first attack on Harvey took the form of a small volume, entitled, "Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters," published very early in 1593. It was a close confutation of the charges made in Harvey's "Four Letters," the vulgarity and insolence of the pedant being pressed home with an insistence which must have been particularly galling to him as coming from a distinguished man of his own university, twenty years his junior. Harvey retorted with the heavy artillery of his "Pierce's Supererogation," which was mainly directed against Nash, whom the disappearance of Peele, and the sudden death of Marlowe in June, had left without any very intimate friend as a supporter. Nash retired, for the moment, from the controversy, and in the prefatory epistle to a remarkable work, the most bulky of all his books, "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," he waved the white flag. He bade, he declared, "a hundred unfortunate farewells to fantastical satirism,"