The “foolish reprehension of faulty men, threatening Harvey with danger,” describes that gregarious herd of town-wits in the age of Elizabeth—Kit Marlow, Robert Greene, Dekker, Nash, &c.—men of no moral principle, of high passions, and the most pregnant Lucianic wits who ever 119 flourished at one period.[84] Unfortunately for the learned Harvey, his “critique pen,” which is strange in so polished a mind and so curious a student, indulged a sharpness of invective which would have been peculiar to himself, had his adversary, Nash, not quite outdone him. Their pamphlets foamed against each other, till Nash, in his vehement invective, involved the whole generation of the Harveys, made one brother more ridiculous than the other, and even attainted the fair name of Gabriel’s respectable sister. Gabriel, indeed, after the death of Robert Greene, the crony of Nash, sitting like a vampyre on his grave, sucked blood from his corpse, in a memorable narrative of the debaucheries and miseries of this town-wit. I throw into the note the most awful satirical address I ever read.[85] It became necessary to dry up the 120 floodgates of these rival ink-horns, by an order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The order is a remarkable fragment of our literary history, and is thus expressed:—“That all Nashe’s bookes and Dr. Harvey’s bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found, and that none of the said bookes be ever printed hereafter.”
This extraordinary circumstance accounts for the excessive rarity of Harvey’s “Foure Letters, 1592,” and that literary scourge of Nash’s, “Have with you to Saffron-Walden (Harvey’s residence), or Gabriel Harvey’s Hunt is vp, 1596;” pamphlets now as costly as if they consisted of leaves of gold.[87]
Nash, who, in his other works, writes in a style as flowing as Addison’s, with hardly an obsolete vestige, has rather injured this literary invective by the evident burlesque he affects of Harvey’s pedantic idiom; and for this Mr. Malone has hastily censured him, without recollecting the aim of this modern Lucian.[88] The delicacy of irony; the sous-entendu, that subtlety of indicating what is not told; all that poignant satire, which is the keener for its polish, were 121 not practised by our first vehement satirists; but a bantering masculine humour, a style stamped in the heat of fancy, with all the life-touches of strong individuality, characterise these licentious wits. They wrote then as the old fabliers told their tales, naming everything by its name; our refinement cannot approve, but it cannot diminish their real nature, and among our elaborate graces, their naïveté must be still wanting.
In this literary satire Nash has interwoven a kind of ludicrous biography of Harvey; and seems to have anticipated the character of Martinus Scriblerus. I leave the grosser parts of this invective untouched; for my business is not with slander, but with ridicule.
Nash opens as a skilful lampooner; he knew well that ridicule, without the appearance of truth, was letting fly an arrow upwards, touching no one. Nash accounts for his protracted silence by adroitly declaring that he had taken these two or three years to get perfect intelligence of Harvey’s “Life and conversation; one true point whereof well sat downe will more excruciate him than knocking him about the ears with his own style in a hundred sheets of paper.”
And with great humour says—
“As long as it is since he writ against me, so long have I given him a lease of his life, and he hath only held it by my mercy; and now let him thank his friends for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him, since I do it but to show my sufficiency; and they urging what a triumph he had over me, hath made me ransack my standish more than I would.”
In the history of such a literary hero as Gabriel, the birth has ever been attended by portents. Gabriel’s mother “dreamt a dream,” that she was delivered “of an immense elder gun that can shoot nothing but pellets of chewed paper; and thought, instead of a boy, she was brought to bed of one of those kistrell birds called a wind-sucker.” At the moment of his birth came into the world “a calf with a double tongue, and eares longer than any ass’s, with his feet turned backwards.” Facetious analogies of Gabriel’s literary genius!
He then paints to the life the grotesque portrait of Harvey; so that the man himself stands alive before us. “He was of an adust swarth choleric dye, like restie bacon, or a dried scate-fish; his skin riddled and crumpled like a piece 122 of burnt parchment, with channels and creases in his face, and wrinkles and frets of old age.” Nash dexterously attributes this premature old age to his own talents; exulting humorously—
“I have brought him low, and shrewdly broken him; look on his head, and you shall find a gray haire for euerie line I have writ against him; and you shall haue all his beard white too by the time he hath read ouer this booke.”