The names of Nash and Harvey are intertwined even more closely than those of Greene and Lodge; but the conjunction is not a grasp of friendship but a grip of hatred—a wrestle, not an embrace. The fact of the quarrel has attracted rather disproportionate attention from the days of Isaac Disraeli onwards; and its original cause is still extremely obscure and very unimportant. By some it is connected, causally as well as accidentally, with the Martin Marprelate business; by some with the fact that Harvey belonged to the inner Sidneian clique, Nash to the outer ring of professional journalists and Bohemians. It at any rate produced some remarkable varieties of the pamphlet, and demonstrated the keen interest which the world takes in the proceedings of any couple of literary men who choose to abuse and befoul one another. Harvey, though no mean scholar, was in mere writing no match for Nash; and his chief answer to the latter, Pierce's Supererogation, is about as rambling, incoherent, and ineffective a combination of pedantry and insolence as need be wished for. It has some not uninteresting, though usually very obscure, hints on literary matters. Besides this, Harvey wrote letters to Spenser with their well-known criticism and recommendation of classical forms, and Foure Letters Touching Robert Greene and Others: with the Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman. A sample of him, not in his abusive-dull, but in his scholarly-dull manner, may be given:—
"Mine own rules and precepts of art, I believe will fall out not greatly repugnant, though peradventure somewhat different: and yet I am not so resolute, but I can be content to reserve the copying out and publishing thereof, until I have a little better consulted with my pillow, and taken some further advice of Madame Sperienza. In the mean time, take this for a general caveat, and say I have revealed one great mystery unto you: I am of opinion, there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either for the assured and infallible certainty of our English artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our language into art, and to frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof; than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same orthography in all points conformable and proportionate to our common natural prosody: whether Sir Thomas Smithies in that respect be the most perfit, as surely it must needs be very good; or else some other of profounder learning and longer experience, than Sir Thomas was, shewing by necessary demonstration, wherein he is defective, will undertake shortly to supply his wants and make him more absolute. Myself dare not hope to hop after him, till I see something or other, to or fro, publicly and authentically established, as it were by a general council, or Act of Parliament: and then peradventure, standing upon firmer ground, for company sake, I may adventure to do as others do. Interim, credit me, I dare give no precepts, nor set down any certain general art: and yet see my boldness, I am not greatly squeamish of my Particular Examples, whereas he that can but reasonably skill of the one, will give easily a shrewd guess at the other: considering that the one fetcheth his original and offspring from the other. In which respect, to say troth, we beginners have the start, and advantage of our followers, who are to frame and conform both their examples and precepts, according to precedent which they have of us: as no doubt Homer or some other in Greek, and Ennius, or I know not who else in Latin, did prejudice, and overrule those that followed them, as well for the quantities of syllables, as number of feet, and the like: their only examples going for current payment, and standing instead of laws, and rules with the posterity."
In Harvey, more perhaps than anywhere else in prose, appears the abusive exaggeration, not humorous or Rabelaisian, but simply rancorous and dull, which mars so much Elizabethan work. In order not to fall into the same error ourselves, we must abstain from repeating the very strong language which has sometimes been applied to his treatment of dead men, and such dead men as Greene and Marlowe, for apparently no other fault than their being friends of his enemy Nash. It is sufficient to say that Harvey had all the worst traits of "donnishness," without having apparently any notion of that dignity which sometimes half excuses the don. He was emphatically of Mr. Carlyle's "acrid-quack" genus.
Thomas Nash will himself hardly escape the charge of acridity, but only injustice or want of discernment will call him a quack. Unlike Harvey, but like Greene and Lodge, he was a verse as well as a prose writer. But his verse is in comparison unimportant. Nor was he tempted to intersperse specimens of it in his prose work. The absolutely best part of that work—the Anti-Martinist pamphlets to be noticed presently—is only attributed to him conjecturally, though the grounds of attribution are very strong. But his characteristics are fully evident in his undoubted productions. The first of these in pamphlet form is the very odd thing called Pierce Penniless [the name by which Nash became known], his Supplication to the Devil. It is a kind of rambling condemnation of luxury, for the most part delivered in the form of burlesque exhortation, which the mediæval sermons joyeux had made familiar in all European countries. Probably some allusions in this refer to Harvey, whose pragmatical pedantry may have in many ways annoyed Nash, a Cambridge man like himself. At any rate the two soon plunged into a regular battle, the documents of which on Nash's side are, first a prognostication, something in the style of Rabelais, then a formal confutation of the Four Letters, and then the famous lampoon entitled Have with you to Saffron Walden [Harvey's birthplace], of which here is a specimen:—
"His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where presenting himself in all the colours of the rainbow, and a pair of moustaches like a black horse tail tied up in a knot, with two tufts sticking out on each side, he was asked by no mean personage, Unde hæc insania? whence proceedeth this folly or madness? and he replied with that weather-beaten piece of a verse out of the Grammar, Semel insanivimus omnes, once in our days there is none of us but have played the idiots; and so was he counted and bade stand by for a Nodgscomb. He that most patronized him, prying more searchingly into him, and finding that he was more meet to make sport with than any way deeply to be employed, with fair words shook him off, and told him he was fitter for the University, than for the Court or his turn, and so bade God prosper his studies, and sent for another Secretary to Oxford.
"Readers, be merry; for in me there shall want nothing I can do to make you merry. You see I have brought the Doctor out of request at Court, and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him hooted out of the University too, ere I give him over. What will you give me when I bring him upon the Stage in one of the principalest Colleges in Cambridge? Lay any wager with me, and I will; or if you lay no wager at all, I'll fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College; where under the chief part, from which it took his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School master, he was full drawn and delineated from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stuffed his mouth with, and no Buffianism throughout his whole books, but they bolstered out his part with; as those ragged remnants in his four familiar epistles 'twixt him and Senior Immerito, raptim scripta, noste manum et stylum, with innumerable other of his rabble-routs: and scoffing his Musarum Lachrymæ with Flebo amorem meum etiam musarum lachrymis; which, to give it his due, was a more collachrymate wretched Treatise than my Piers Penniless, being the pitifulest pangs that ever any man's Muse breathed forth. I leave out half; not the carrying up of his gown, his nice gait on his pantoffles, or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated. And if I should reveal all, I think they borrowed his gown to play the part in, the more to flout him. Let him deny this (and not damn himself) for his life if he can. Let him deny that there was a Shew made at Clare Hall of him and his two brothers, called,
"Tarra, rantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum
Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia
Let him deny that there was another Shew made of the little Minnow his brother, Dodrans Dick, at Peter-house called,
"Duns furens. Dick Harvey in a frensy.
Whereupon Dick came and broke the College glass windows; and Doctor Perne (being then either for himself or deputy Vice-Chancellor) caused him to be fetched in, and set in the Stocks till the Shew was ended, and a great part of the night after."