The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton Read online

establishment ofthe Church, by the Dean of Sarum, on the one hand, and a treatise byJohn Penry the Puritan, on the other, both published in 1587. In 1588followed the violent Puritan libel, called "Martin Marprelate," secretlyprinted, and written, perhaps, by a lawyer named Barrow. Towards theclose of the dispute several of the literary wits dashed in upon theprelatical side, and denounced the Martinists with exuberant highspirits. Among these Nash was long thought to have held a very prominentplace, for the two most brilliant tracts of the entire controversy,"Pap with an Hatchet," 1589, and "An Almond for a Parrot," 1590, wereconfidently attributed to him. These are now, however, clearly perceivedto be the work of a much riper pen, that, namely, of Lyly.

  It is probable that the four anonymous and privately printed tracts,which Dr. Grosart has finally selected, do represent Nash's share inthe Marprelate Controversy, although in one of them, "Martin's Month'sMind," I cannot say that I recognize his manner. The "Countercuff,"published in August, 1589, from Gravesend, shows a great advance inpower. The academic Euphuism has been laid aside; images and trains ofthought are taken from life and experience instead of from books. In"Pasquils Return," which belongs to October of the same year, the authorinvents the happy word "Pruritans" to annoy his enemy, and speaks,probably in his own name, but perhaps in that of Pasquil, of a visitto Antwerp. "Martin's Month's Mind," which is a crazy piece of fustian,belongs to December, 1589, while the fourth tract, "Pasquil's Apology,"appeared so late as July, 1590. The smart and active pen whichskirmishes in these pamphlets adds nothing serious to the considerationof the tragical controversy in which it so lightly took part. It amusedand trained Nash to write these satires, but they left Udall none theworse and the Bishops none the better. The author repeatedly promises torehearse the arguments on both sides and sum up the entire controversyin a "May-Game of Martinism," of which we hear no more.

  During the first twelve months of Nash's residence in London hewas pretty busily employed. It is just conceivable that six smallpublications may have brought in money enough to support him. But afterthis we perceive no obvious source of income for some considerabletime. How the son of a poor Suffolk minister contrived to live inLondon throughout the years 1590 and 1591, it is difficult to imagine.Certainly not on the proceeds of a single pamphlet. It is not crediblethat Nash published much that has not come down to us. Perhaps a tracthere and there may have been lost.{1} He probably subsisted by hangingon to the outskirts of education. Perhaps he taught pupils, more likelystill he wrote letters. We know, afterall, too little of the manners ofthe age to venture on a reply to the question which constantly imposesitself, How did the minor Elizabethan man of letters earn a livelihood?In the case of Nash, I would hazard the conjecture, which is borne out,I think, by several allusions in his writings, that he was a reader tothe press, connected, perhaps, with the Queen's printers, or with thoseunder the special protection of the Bishops.

  1 One long narrative poem, the very name of which is too coarse to quote, was, according to Oldys, certainly published; but of this no printed copy is known to exist. John Davies of Hereford says that "good men tore that pamphlet to pieces." I owe to the kindness of Mr. A. H. Bullen the inspection of a transtript of a very corrupt manuscript of this work.

  His only production in 1591, so far as we know, was the insignificanttract called "A Wonderful Astrological Prognostication," by "AdamFouleweather." This has been hastily treated as a defence of "thedishonoured memory" of Nash's dead friend Greene against GabrielHarvey. But Greene did not die till the end of 1592, and in the"Prognostication" there is nothing about either Greene or Harvey. Thepamphlet is a quizzical satire on the almanac-makers, very much in thespirit of Swift's Bickerstaff "Predictions" a hundred years later.Of more importance was a preface contributed in this same year to SirPhilip Sidney's posthumous "Astrophel and Stella." In this short essayNash reaches a higher level of eloquence than he had yet achieved, and,in spite of its otiose redundancy, this enthusiastic eulogy of Sidney ispleasant reading.

  In 1592, doubtless prior to the death of Greene, Nash published theearliest of his important books, the volume entitled "Pierce Pennilesshis Supplication to the Devil." This is a grotesque satire on the vicesand the eccentricities of the age. As a specimen of prose style it isremarkable for its spirit and "go," qualities which may enable us toforget how turbid, ungraceful, and harsh it is. Nash had now droppedthe mannerism of the Euphuists; he had hardly gained a style of hisown. "Pierce Penniless," with its chains of "letter-leaping metaphors,"rattles breathlessly on, and at length abruptly ceases. Any sense ofthe artistic fashioning of a sentence, or of the relative harmony of theparts of a composition, was not yet dreamed of. But before we condemnthe muddy turbulence of the author, we must recollect that nothinghad then been published of Hooker, Raleigh, or Bacon in the pedestrianmanner. Genuine English prose had begun to exist indeed, but had notyet been revealed to the world. Nash, as a lively portrait-painter ingrotesque, at this time, is seen at his best in such a caricature asthis, scourging "the pride of the Dane":--

  "The most gross and senseless proud dolts are the Danes, who stand somuch upon their unwieldy burly-boned soldiery, that they account ofno man that hath not a battle-axe at his girdle to hough dogs with, orwears 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 lenthim a flab-berkin face, like one of the four winds, and cheeks that saglike a woman's dug over his chinbone, his apparel is so stuffed up withbladders of taffaty, and his back like beef stuffed with parsley, sodrawn out with ribbands and devises, and blistered with light sarcenetbastings, 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, havingsent to the press from his deathbed those two remarkable pamphlets, the"Groatsworth of Wit" and the "Repentance." For two years past, if we maybelieve Nash, the profligate atheism of the elder poet had estranged hisfriend, or at all events had kept him at a distance. But a feeling ofcommon loyalty, and the anger which a true man of letters feels when agenuine poet is traduced by a pedant, led Nash to take up a very strongposition as a defender of the reputation of Greene. Gabriel Harvey,although the friend of Spenser, is a personage who fills an odious placein the literary history of the last years of Elizabeth. He was a scholarand a university man of considerable attainments, but he was whollywithout taste, and he concentrated into vinegar a temper which mustalways have had a tendency to be sour. In particular, he loathed theschool of young writers who had become famous in direct opposition tothe literary laws which he had laid down.

  Harvey's wrath had found a definite excuse in the tract, called "A Quipfor an upstart Courtier, or a quaint dispute between Velvet-Breechesand Cloth-Breeches," which Greene had published early in the year1592. Accordingly, when he heard of Greene's death, he hastened to hislodgings, interviewed his landlady, collected scurrilous details, and,with matchless bad taste, issued, before the month was over, his "FourLetters," a pamphlet in which he trampled upon the memory of Greene. Inthe latest of his public utterances, Greene had made an appeal to threefriends, who, though not actually named, are understood to have beenMarlowe, Peele, and Nash.

  Of these, the last was the one with the readiest pen, and the task ofpunishing 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," publishedvery early in 1593. It was a close confutation of the charges made inHarvey's "Four Letters," the vulgarity and insolence of the pedantbeing pressed home with an insistence which must have been particularlygalling 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, whomthe disappearance of Peele, and the sudden death of Marlowe in June, hadleft without any very intimate friend as a supporter. Nash retired,for the moment, from the controversy, and in t
he prefatory epistle to aremarkable work, the most bulky of all his books, "Christ's Tears overJerusalem," he waved the white flag. He bade, he declared, "a hundredunfortunate farewells to fantastical satirism," and complimented hislate antagonist on his "abundant scholarship." Harvey took no notice ofthis, and for four years their mutual animosity slumbered. In this sameyear, 1593, Nash produced the only play which has come down to usas wholly composed by him, the comedy of "Summer's Last Will andTestament."

  Meanwhile "Pierce Penniless" had enjoyed a remarkable success, and hadplaced Nash