NASH, THOMAS. Have with you to Saffron-walden, or Gabriell Harueys Hunt is up. Containing a full An

should presume to intermeddle in your matters: it cannot be done with any intent but to stirre me up to write against you afresh, which nothing under heaven shall draw mee to doe. I love you unfainedly, and admire your aged Muse, that may well be grandmother to our grand-eloquentest Poets at this present. Sanctum et venerabile vetus omne Poema. Shore's Wife is yong, though you be stept in yeares: in her shall you live when you are dead."

Churchyard's "Tragedie of Shore's Wife" had been long before the world, but he "much augmented it with divers new additions" in 1593; and as that impression has recently come into our hands, and as we have said nothing of it elsewhere, we are tempted to make an extract or two from it. The whole is in the popular form adopted in "The Mirror for Magistrates," where every personage tells his own tale. After an introduction, Jane Shore thus proceeds:

"My selfe for proofe, loe! here I now appeare

In womans weede, with weeping watred eyes,

That bought her youth and her delights full deare,
Whose lewd reproach doth sound unto the skies,
And bids my corse out of the ground to rise,

As one that may no longer hide her face,

But needes must come and shewe her piteous case.

"The sheete of shame wherein I shrowded was

Did move me oft to plaine before this day,
And in mine eares did ring the trompe of brasse
Which is defame, that doth each thing bewray:
Yea, though full dead and low in earth I lay,
I heard the voyce, of mee what people saide;
But then to speake, alas, I was afraide."

Churchyard's main defect is want of originality of thought, mistaking commonplace reflections on morals and men for novelties.

Jane Shore thus describe herself:

"The beaten snow, nor lily of the field

No whiter, sure, then naked necke and hande:
My lookes had force to make a lyon yeeld,
And at my forme in gaze a world would stand.
My body small, framd finely to be spand,

As though dame Kind had sworne, in solemne sort,
To shrowd herselfe in my faire forme and port.

"No part amisse when nature tooke such care
To set me out as nought should be awry,

He makes

swere to the eldest sonne of the Halter-maker. Or, Nashe his confutation of the sinfull Doctor. The Mott or Posie, instead of Omne tulit punctum: Pacis fiducia nunquam. As much as to say, as I sayd I would speake with him. Printed at London by John Danter. 1596. 4to. 83 leaves.

--

The course of the quarrel between Nash and Gabriel Harvey appears to have been this. In 1592, Greene, in his " Quip for an upstart Courtier," had called Harvey and his two brothers the sons of a rope-maker at Saffron Walden as they unquestionably were. In the same year, after Greene's death, Harvey replied in his "Four Letters and certain Sonnets"; and Nash took up the cudgels for his deceased friend in " Strange News," also bearing date in 1592. Harvey returned to the contest in his "Pierce's Supererrogation" of 1593. Nash, with apparent sincerity, offered amends and reconcilement in his "Christ's Tears" of 1593, which Harvey indignantly rejected in his "New Letter of Notable Contents," also of 1593. In 1594 Nash recalled his amends, and renewed the attack in an epistle preceding a reissue of his "Christ's Tears"; and thus matters rested until, in 1596, Harvey being still unforgiving and revengeful, Nash put forth the volume which gives title to the present article. He dedicated it in burlesque to Richard Litchfield, the barber of Trinity College, Cambridge; and in 1597 Harvey answered Nash under the assumed character of the same barber. We have stated these points and dates, in order to render what we are about to offer regarding Nash's "Have with you to Saffron Walden" more intelligible. The reader will thus see in what order it came out, and to what it was meant by its author to be a reply.

To furnish forth (in due proportion rare)
A peece of worke should please a princes eie.
O, would to God that boast might prove a lie!
For pride youth tooke in beauties borrowd trash
Gave age a whippe, and left me in the lash."

In his "Mirror of Man," 1594, Churchyard tells us that he first took up the subject of "Shore's Wife," "almost 50 yeares ago." He ought to have said 30 years ago, in "The Mirror for Magistrates," 1563, fol. clv. b.

It is written in Nash's usual off-hand and trenchant style, and
the long rambling dedication to Litchfield contains the noted pas-
sage showing that there was a Latin play upon the history of
Richard III. as early as 1596. There, too, we are told of Tarl-
ton, the "Dick of all Dicks," who, coming into a church where
the organ was out of repair, proposed to supply the deficiency with
his pipe and tabor.

In his address to the Reader, Nash excuses himself for not
having answered Harvey earlier, and thus added length to "the
lease of his adversary's life." He then explains that he had
written his reply in the Italian style, by way of dialogue, the
interlocutors being Importunio (grand Consiliadore), Bentivoli
Carneades de boone Compagniola, and himself, of whom he gen-
erally speaks as Pierce Penniless, though sometimes as Nash,
and Tom Nash. Here it is that he charges Polidore Virgil, in
the time of Henry VIII., with having "burned all the ancient
records of the true beginning of our Isle after he had finished his
Chronicle." Nash laughs at Harvey for the length of his prelim-
inary matter, but he does not arrive at the commencement of his
own work until sign. D.

Near the opening of the dialogue he accounts for his delay
in replying to Harvey's "Pierce's Supererrogation," and "New
Letter of notable Contents," by making his friend Importunio
vouch that, during the greater part of the interval, “he hath
been hatching of nothing but toies for private gentlemen, and
neglected the peculiar business of his reputation, that so deeply
concerned him, to follow vaine hopes, and had I wist humours
about Court, that make him goe in a thredbare cloake, and
scarce pay for boat hire." Nash afterwards confirms this state-
ment in his own person, and from his own mouth: "I am faine,"
he says, "to let my plow stand still in the midst of a furrow,
and follow some of these new-fangled Galiardos and Senior
Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas I pros-
titute my pen in hope of gaine; but otherwise there is no new
fanglenes in mee but povertie, which alone maketh mee so un-
constant to my determined studies; nor idlenesse, more then
discontented trudging from place to place, too and fro, and pros-
ecuting the meanes to keep me from idlenesse."

This is curious, if only that it affords one more proof, out of numbers that might be adduced, to show the manner in which the young Innamorati of that day not unfrequently employed better pens than their own to write their love-verses.

Nash informs us that his "Pierce Penniless's Supplication had been “maimedly translated into the French tongue," (sign F,) and that in English "it had passed, at the least, through the pikes of sixe impressions." A page or two afterwards he inserts a woodcut of his antagonist, heading it "The picture of Gabriell Harvey, as he is ready to let fly upon Ajax." He thus drolly introduces it: "Those that be disposed to take a view of him, ere hee bee come to the full Midsommer Moone, and raging Calentura of his wretchednes, here let them behold his lively counterfet and portraiture; not in the pantofles of his prosperitie, as he was when he libeld against my Lord of Oxford, but in the single-soald pumpes of his adversitie, with his gowne cast off, untrussing and ready to beray himselfe upon the newes of the going in hand of my booke."

Harvey might be a match for Nash in abuse and argument, but he was by no means a match for him in ridicule, and it was such as would pierce the skin of the hardest pachyderm; while thinskinned Harvey, whose vanity was not less than his violence, smarted under it most severely. All he could do in revenge was, in the character of Litchfield, the barber, similarly to exhibit Nash in fetters, in reference to his imprisonment for a now lost drama called "The Isle of Dogs." The subsequent passage is important, since it shows that in 1596 the boys of St. Paul's School were again in disgrace, and prohibited from acting their usual plays. In connection with them Nash mentions one of Lyly's dramas by name, as if it had been the cause of silencing the young company:-"Troth," says Carneades, "I would hee might for mee (that's all the harme I wish him) for then we neede never wish the Playes of Powles up againe; but if we were wearie with walking, and loth to goe too farre to seeke sport, into the Arches we might step, and heare him plead, which would be a merrier Comedie then ever was old Mother Bomby."

On signature I 2 begins a pretended biography of Harvey

under the title of "The life and godly education, from his childhood, of that thrice famous Clarke, and worthie Orator and Poet, Gabriell Harvey," very provoking and ridiculous, but doubtless (to render it more biting) in many places founded on fact. Here, in reference to Richard Harvey, one of the brothers of Gabriel, Nash says: "This is that Dick of whom Kit Marloe was wont to say, that he was an asse good for nothing but to preach of the Iron Age." Some pages on Nash abuses Barnabe Barnes and Anthony Chute, and imputes to the latter a work called "Procris and Cephalus," which was entered by Wolfe on the books of the Stationers' Company in 1593, but, if printed, no copy of it is now known. If we may believe Nash, Chute was also author of a comedy on "the transformation of the King of Trinidadoes two Daughters Panachæa and Tobacco." This too has been lost, although an anonymous narrative poem, in couplets, on the "Metamorphosis of Tobacco," was printed in 1602. In 1596 Chute was dead, and, as Nash asserts, "rotten." John Lyly, we learn on the same authority, was then at work on "the Paradoxe of the Ass," which we might think the very production called "The Nobleness of the Ass," reviewed Vol. I. p. 40, but that it was printed with the date of 1595. It might be a mistake for 1596, or the tract might be antedated.

As Nash's "Have with you," &c. has not been hitherto duly noticed in any bibliographical work, we may here add a brief passage in which he speaks of his father, the clergyman of Lowestoft, whom Harvey had very unfairly dragged into the compass of his attack." My father," he asserts, "put more good meate in poore mens mouthes, than all the ropes and living is worth his [Harvey's] Father left him, together with his mother and two brothers; and (as another Scholler) he brought me up at S. Johns, where (it is well knowen) I might have been Fellow if I had would."

It must be acknowledged that Nash draws out his reply to Harvey to an unreasonable length, and some letters from Chettle and Thorius (who had been reconciled to Nash and withdrawn from Harvey) might have been omitted. We only add that Messrs. Cooper, in their generally accurate account of Nash (Ath.