Gabriel Harvey must have felt, on reading "Have with you to Saffron Walden," that his antagonist was right in saying that his pen carried "the hot shot of a musket." Unfortunately, while Harvey was smarting under these insulting gibes and jests, the jester himself got into public trouble. Little is known of the circumstance which led the Queen's Privy Council, in the summer of 1597, to throw Nash into the Fleet Prison, but it was connected with the performance of a comedy called "The Isle of Dogs," which gave offence to the authorities. This play was not printed, and is no longer in existence. The Lord Admiral's Company of actors, which produced it, had its licence withdrawn until the 27th of August, when Nash was probably liberated. Gabriel Harvey was not the man to allow this event to go unnoticed. He hurried into print with his "Trimming of Thomas Nash," 1597, a pamphlet of the most outrageous abuse addressed "to the polypragmatical, parasitupocritical and pantophainoudendecontical puppy Thomas Nash," and adorned with a portrait of that gentleman in irons, with heavy gyves upon his ankles. According to Nash, however, the part of "The Isle of Dogs" which was his composition was so trifling in extent that his imprisonment was a gratuitous act of oppression. How the play with this pleasing title offended has not been handed down to us.
Nash was now a literary celebrity, and yet it is at this precise moment that his figure begins to fade out of sight For the next two years he is not known to have made any public appearance. In 1599 he published the best of all his books; it was unfortunately the latest "Nash's Lenten Stuff; or, the Praise of the Red Herring" is an encomium on the hospitable town of Yarmouth, to which, in the autumn of 1597, he had fled for consolation, and in which, through six happy weeks, he had found what he sought The "kind entertainment and benign hospitality" of the compassionate clime of Yarmouth deserve from the poor exile a cordial return, and, accordingly, he sings the praise of the Red Herring as richly as if his mouth were still tingling with the delicate bloater. In this book, Nash is kind enough to explain to us the cause of some of the peculiarities of his style. His endeavour has been to be Italianate, and "of all styles I most affect and strive to imitate Aretine's."
Whether he was deeply read in the works of il divino Aretino, we may doubt; but it is easy to see that this Scourge of Princes, the very type of the emancipated Italian of the sixteenth century, might have a vague and dazzling attraction for his little eager English imitator.
Be that as it may, "Lenten Stuff" gives us evidence that Nash had now arrived at a complete mastery of the fantastic and irrelevant manner which he aimed at. This book is admirably composed, if we can bring ourselves to admit that the genre is ever admirable. The writer's vocabulary has become opulent, his phrases flash and detonate, each page is full of unconnected sparks and electrical discharges. A sort of aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface, amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us so frequently in doubt as to his meaning. If this was the result of the imitation of Aretino, Nash's choice of a master was scarcely a fortunate one.
Thomas Nash was now thirty-two years of age, and with the publication of "Lenten Stuff" we lose sight of him. His old play of "Summers' Last Will and Testament" was printed in 1600, and he probably died in that year. The song at the close of that comedy or masque reads like the swan-song of its author:—
Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure;
Gone is our sport, fled is poor [Nash's] pleasure!
Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace;
Ah! who shall hide us from the winter's face?
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease:
From winter, plague and pestilence,
Good Lord, deliver us!
London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn,
Trades cry, Woe worth that ever they were born;
The want of term is town and city's harm.
Close chambers we do want, to keep us warm;
Long banished must we live from our friends:
This low-built house will bring us to our ends.
From winter, plague and pestilence,
Good Lord, deliver us!
Whether pestilence or winter slew him, we do not know. In 1601 Fitzgeoffrey published a short Latin elegy on Nash in his "Affaniae," alluding in happy phrase to the twin lightnings of his armed tongue and his terrible pen; and Nash had six lines of tempered praise in "The Return from Parnassus." But all we know of the cause or manner of Nash's death has to be collected from a passage in "A Knight's Conjuring," 1607, written by the satirist on whom his mantle descended, Thomas Dekker. Nash is seen advancing along the Elysian Fields:—
"Marlowe, Greene, and Peele had got under the shades of a large vine, laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their college, still haunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that followed him here upon earth; for Nash inveighed bitterly, as he had wont to do, against dry-fisted patrons, accusing them of his untimely death, because if they had given his Muse that cherishment which she most worthily deserved, he had fed to his dying day on fat capons, burnt sack and sugar, and not so desperately have ventured his life and shortened his days by keeping company with pickle herrings."
This looks as though Nash died of a disease attributed to coarse and unwholesome cheap food. His fame proved to be singularly ephemeral. So far as I am aware, no book of his was reprinted after his death, with the single exception of "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," which was issued again in 1613. His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened at the close of the next century by Winstanley and by Langbaine, but Oldys, the celebrated antiquary, was the first person who seriously endeavoured to trace the incidents of his life.
Dr. A. B. Grosart saved the works of Nash from all danger of destruction by printing an issue of them, in six volumes, for fifty private subscribers, in 1883-85. But he still remains completely inaccessible to the general reader.