Thus Harvey reasons, till he becomes unreasonable; one would have imagined that the literary satires of our English Lucian had been voluminous enough, without the mathematical demonstration. The banterers seem to have put poor Harvey nearly out of his wits; he and his friends felt their blows too profoundly; they were much too thin-skinned, and the solemn air of Harvey in his graver moments at their menaces is extremely ludicrous. They frequently called him Gabrielissime Gabriel, which quintessence of himself seems to have mightily affected him. They threatened to confute his letters till eternity—which seems to have put him in despair. The following passage, descriptive of Gabriel’s distresses, may excite a smile.
“This grand confuter of my letters says, ‘Gabriel, if there be any wit or industrie in thee, now I will dare it to the vttermost; write of what thou wilt, in what language thou wilt, and I will confute it, and answere it. Take Truth’s part, and I will proouve truth to be no truth, marching ovt of thy dung-voiding mouth.’ He will never leave me as long as he is able to lift a pen, ad infinitum; if I reply, he has a rejoinder; and for my brief triplication, he is prouided with a quadruplication, and so he mangles my sentences, hacks my arguments, wrenches my words, chops and changes my phrases, even to the disjoyning and dislocation of my whole meaning.”
Poor Harvey! he knew not that there was nothing real in ridicule, no end to its merry malice!
Harvey’s taste for hexameter verses, which he so unnaturally forced into our language, is admirably ridiculed. 127 Harvey had shown his taste for these metres by a variety of poems, to whose subjects Nash thus sarcastically alludes:—
“It had grown with him into such a dictionary custom, that no may-pole in the street, no wether-cocke on anie church-steeple, no arbour, no lawrell, no yewe-tree, he would ouerskip, without hayling in this manner. After supper, if he chancst to play at cards with a queen of harts in his hands, he would run upon men’s and women’s hearts all the night.”
And he happily introduces here one of the miserable hexameter conceits of Harvey—
| Stout hart and sweet hart, yet stoutest hart to be stooped. |
Harvey’s “Encomium Lauri” thus ridiculously commences,
|
What might I call this tree? A lawrell? O bonny lawrell, Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto; |
which Nash most happily burlesques by describing Harvey under a yew-tree at Trinity-hall, composing verses on the weathercock of Allhallows in Cambridge:—