The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton | Page 7

flow for want of reparations, I am fain to let my plough stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these newfangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous villanellas and quipassas, I prostitute my pen in hope of gain.... Many a fair day ago have I proclaimed myself to the world Piers Penniless."
Gabriel Harvey must have felt, on reading "Have with you to Saffron Walden," that his antagonist was right in saying that his pen carried "the hot shot of a musket." Unfortunately, while Harvey was smarting under these insulting gibes and jests, the jester himself got into public trouble. Little is known of the circumstance which led the Queen's Privy Council, in the summer of 1597, to throw Nash into the Fleet Prison, but it was connected with the performance of a comedy called "The Isle of Dogs," which gave offence to the authorities. This play was not printed, and is no longer in existence. The Lord Admiral's Company of actors, which produced it, had its licence withdrawn until the 27th of August, when Nash was probably liberated. Gabriel Harvey was not the man to allow this event to go unnoticed. He hurried into print with his "Trimming of Thomas Nash," 1597, a pamphlet of the most outrageous abuse addressed "to the polypragmatical, parasitupocritical and pantophainoudendecontical puppy Thomas Nash," and adorned with a portrait of that gentleman in irons, with heavy gyves upon his ankles. According to Nash, however, the part of "The Isle of Dogs" which was his composition was so trifling in extent that his imprisonment was a gratuitous act of oppression. How the play with this pleasing title offended has not been handed down to us.
Nash was now a literary celebrity, and yet it is at this precise moment that his figure begins to fade out of sight For the next two years he is not known to have made any public appearance. In 1599 he published the best of all his books; it was unfortunately the latest "Nash's Lenten Stuff; or, the Praise of the Red Herring" is an encomium on the hospitable town of Yarmouth, to which, in the autumn of 1597, he had fled for consolation, and in which, through six happy weeks, he had found what he sought The "kind entertainment and benign hospitality" of the compassionate clime of Yarmouth deserve from the poor exile a cordial return, and, accordingly, he sings the praise of the Red Herring as richly as if his mouth were still tingling with the delicate bloater. In this book, Nash is kind enough to explain to us the cause of some of the peculiarities of his style. His endeavour has been to be Italianate, and "of all styles I most affect and strive to imitate Aretine's."
Whether he was deeply read in the works of il divino Aretino, we may doubt; but it is easy to see that this Scourge of Princes, the very type of the emancipated Italian of the sixteenth century, might have a vague and dazzling attraction for his little eager English imitator.
Be that as it may, "Lenten Stuff" gives us evidence that Nash had now arrived at a complete mastery of the fantastic and irrelevant manner which he aimed at. This book is admirably composed, if we can bring ourselves to admit that the genre is ever admirable. The writer's vocabulary has become opulent, his phrases flash and detonate, each page is full of unconnected sparks and electrical discharges. A sort of aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface, amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us so frequently in doubt as to his meaning. If this was the result of the imitation of Aretino, Nash's choice of a master was scarcely a fortunate one.
Thomas Nash was now thirty-two years of age, and with the publication of "Lenten Stuff" we lose sight of him. His old play of "Summers' Last Will and Testament" was printed in 1600, and he probably died in that year. The song at the close of that comedy or masque reads like the swan-song of its author:--
Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure; Gone is our sport, fled is poor [Nash's] pleasure! Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace;
Ah! who shall hide us from the winter's face? Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease, And here we lie, God knows, with little ease:
From winter, plague and pestilence, Good Lord, deliver us!
London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn, Trades cry, Woe worth that ever they were born; The want of term is town and city's harm.
Close chambers we do want, to keep us