Nashe[105] also would have been good mate-fellow with Marlowe; a Cambridge man this—though possibly “weaned before his time;” certainly most outspoken, hard to govern, quick-witted, fearless, flinging his fiery word-darts where he would. Gabriel Harvey, that priggish patron of Spenser, to whom I have alluded, found this to his cost. Indeed this satirist came to have the name of the English Aretino—as sharp as he, and as wild-living, and wild-loving as he.
Nashe was a native of Lowestoft, on the easternmost point of English shore, in Suffolk, not far from those potteries (of Gurton) whose old quaint products collectors still seek for and value. Dr. Grosart, in the Huth Library, has built a wordy monument to his memory; we do not say it is undeserved; certainly he had a full brain, great readiness, graphic power, and deep love for his friends. Like Lodge, he travelled: like him took to his wits to pay tavern bills; a sharp fellow every way. He lent a hand, and a strong one, to that tedious, noisy, brawling ecclesiastic controversy of his day—called the Mar-Prelate one; a controversy full of a great swash of those prickly, sharp-tasted, biting words—too often belonging to church quarrels—and which men hardly approach for comment, even in our time, without getting themselves pricked by contact into wrathful splutter of ungracious language.
One may get a true taste (and I think a surfeit) of his exuberance in epithet, and of his coarse but rasping raillery in his Pierce Penilesse. Here is one of his pleasant lunges at some “Latinless” critic:—“Let a scholar write and he says—‘Tush, I like not these common fellows’; let him write well, and he says—‘Tush, it’s stolen out of some book.’”
Then there was Robert Greene[106]—a Reverend, but used to tavern gatherings, and whose story is a melancholy one, and worth a little more than mere mention. He was a man of excellent family, well nurtured, as times went; native of the old city of Norwich, in Norfolk; probably something older than either Marlowe or Shakespeare; studied at St. John’s, Cambridge—“amongst wags”—he says in his Repentance—“as lewd as myself;” was a clergyman (after a sort); pretty certainly had a church at one time; married a charming wife in the country, but going up to that maelstrom of London fell into all evil ways: wrote little poems a saint might have written, and cracked jokes with his tongue that would make a saint shudder; deserted his wife and child; became a red-bearded bully, raging in the taverns, with unkempt hair: Yet even thus and there (as if all England in those Elizabethan times bloomed with lilies and lush roses, which lent their perfume to all verse the vilest might write) inditing poems having a tender pathos, which will live. Take these verselets for instance; and as you read them, remember that he had deserted his pure, fond, loving wife and his prattling boy, and was more deeply sunk in ways of debauchery than any of his fellows; ’tis a mother’s song to her child:—
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
Streaming tears that never stint,
Like pearl-drops from a flint,
Fell by course from his eyes,
That one another’s place supplies.