The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton | Page 5

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," and complimented his late antagonist on his "abundant
scholarship." Harvey took no notice of this, and for four years their
mutual animosity slumbered. In this same year, 1593, Nash produced
the only play which has come down to us as wholly composed by him,
the comedy of "Summer's Last Will and Testament."
Meanwhile "Pierce Penniless" had enjoyed a remarkable success, and
had placed Nash in a prominent position among London men of letters.
We learn that in 1596, four years after its original publication, it had
run through six editions, besides being translated in 1594 into French,
and, a little later, into Macaronic Latin. In "Christ's Tears" the young
writer, conscious of his new importance, deals with what the critics
have said about his style. He tells us, and we cannot wonder at it, that
objections have been made to "my boisterous compound words, and
ending my Italianate coined verbs all in ize." His defence is not unlike
that of De Quincey; we can imagine his asking, when urged to be
simple, whether simplicity be in place in a description of Belshazzar's
Feast He says that the Saxon monosyllables that swarm in the English

tongue are a scandal to it, and that he is only turning this cheap silver
trash into fine gold coinage. Books, he says, written in plain English,
"seem like shopkeepers' boxes, that contain nothing else save halfpence,
three-farthings, and two-pences." To show what sort of doubloons he
proposes to mint for English pockets, we need go no further than the
opening phrases of his dedication of this very book to that amiable poet,
the Lady Elizabeth Carey:--
"Excellent accomplished court-glorifying Lady, give me leave, with the
sportive sea-porpoises, preludiately a little to play before the storm of
my tears, to make my prayer before I proceed to my sacrifice. Lo, for
an oblation to the rich burnished shrine of your virtue, a handful of
Jerusalem's mummianized earth, in a few sheets of waste paper
enwrapped, I here, humiliate, offer up at your feet."
These, however, in spite of the odd neologisms, are sentences formed
in a novel and a greatly improved manner, and the improvement is
sustained throughout this curious volume. Probably the intimate study
of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which this semi-theological
tractate necessitated, had much to do with the clarification of the
author's style. At all events, from this time forth, Nash drops, except in
polemical passages where his design is provocative, that irritating
harshness in volubility which had hitherto marked his manner of
writing. Here, for example, is a passage from "Christ's Tears" which is
not without a strangely impressive melody:--
"Over the Temple, at the solemn feast of the Passover, was seen a
comet most coruscant, streamed and tailed forth, with glistering naked
swords, which in his mouth, as a man in his hand all at once, he made
semblance as if he shaked and vambrashed. Seven days it continued; all
which time, the Temple was as clear and light in the night as it had
been noonday. In the Sanctum Sanctorum was heard clashing and
hewing of armour, while flocks of ravens, with a fearful croaking cry,
beat, fluttered and clashed against the windows. A hideous dismal owl,
exceeding all her kind in deformity and quantity, in the Temple-porch
built her nest. From under the altar there issued penetrating plangorous
howlings and ghastly deadmen's groans."

He tells us, in the preface, that he takes an autumnal air, and in truth
there is a melancholy refinement in this volume which we may seek for
in vain elsewhere in Nash's writings. The greater part of the book is a
"collachrimate oration" over Jerusalem, placed in the mouth of our
Saviour; by degrees the veil of Jerusalem grows thinner and thinner,
and we see more and more clearly through it the London of Elizabeth,
denounced by a pensive and not, this time, a turbulent satirist.
In 1594 Nash's pen was particularly active. It was to the Lady Elizabeth
Carey, again, that he dedicated "The Terrors of the Night," a discourse
on apparitions. He describes some very agreeable ghosts, as, for
instance, those which appeared to a gentleman, a friend of the author's,
in the guise of "an inveigling troop of naked virgins, whose odoriferous
breath more perfumed the air than ordnance would that is charged with
amomum, musk, civet and ambergreece." It was surely a
mock-modesty which led Nash to fear that such ghost-stories as these
would appear to his readers duller than Holland cheese and more
tiresome than homespun. To 1594, too, belongs the tragedy of