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

Edmund Gosse
Sidney's posthumous "Astrophel and Stella." In this short essay
Nash reaches a higher level of eloquence than he had yet achieved, and,
in spite of its otiose redundancy, this enthusiastic eulogy of Sidney 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
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