Puritan Discipline Tracts.
AN ALMOND FOR A PARROT;
BEING
A REPLY
TO
MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.
Re-printed from the Black Letter Edition,
WITH
AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES.
LONDON:
JOHN PETHERAM, 71, CHANCERY LANE.
1846.
INTRODUCTION.
Although I cannot at this time bring together positive and undoubted evidence of the authorship of the following tract, (because the materials are at present inaccessible to me,) at some future period, in the Introduction to one of his accredited productions, I hope to place the fact beyond the reach of cavil or question, that Thomas Nash, to whom public fame has given it, was the author.
Nash was of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and took his degree of B.A. in 1585. He is supposed to have quitted the university in some disgrace about 1586, but of the cause we are entirely ignorant. The anonymous author of a tract called “Polymanteia,” printed in 1595, thus alludes to it: “Cambridge, make thy two children friends; thou hast been unkind to one [Nash], to wean him before his time, and too fond upon the other [Gabriel Harvey], to keep him so long without preferment; the one is ancient and of small reading; the other is young and full of wit.” Nash himself speaks of his beardless years, in Pierce Penniless; and Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierce’s Supererogation, 1592, calls him “a gosling of the printing house;” and in another place “a proper young man;” and elsewhere, “a young man of the greenest spring, as beardless in judgment as in face:” so that he must have taken his degree of B.A. early in life, and we know that he never proceeded Master of Arts.