Nash and Harvey shared with Greene the luck, good or other, of being earlier presented in their lives, and in at least some of their works, to modern writers than their fellows. Indeed, Greene's not wholly enviable fame is as much due to the quarrels of these two as to his own works. Gabriel Harvey, the elder but very much the less able of the two, was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a friend of Sidney and of Spenser (whose Faërie Queene he unmercifully snubbed, preferring the curious fancy of classical metres which was long patronised by the 'Areopagus' or Sidneian clique), and a man of real scholarship. But his exemplification of the worst faults of the university prig, and the pitiless exposure of them in his controversy with Thomas Nash (a younger Cambridge man, and wielder of the sharpest and most unscrupulous pen of his time), have brought down such hard language on him from most literary historians that one or two charitable or paradoxical souls have been tempted to take up the cudgels on his side. To this length, I cannot go. Why Harvey and Nash quarrelled no one knows exactly; but the quarrel, the pamphlet results of which make up the greater part of Harvey's work, plays only a small part in that of Nash. The very quarrel itself had, or seems to have had, something to do with the strange Marprelate business to be noticed presently, and Nash is at least with great probability supposed author of some of the chief numbers of that controversy on the anti-Martinist side. But he wrote not a little other pamphlet-matter, never quite attempting the euphuist romance in which his friends Greene and Lodge delighted, but producing discourses of apparitions in anticipation of Defoe, pious tractates expressing, or professing to express, his repentance for evil living, puffs (though this is rather an unkind word), such as his Lenten Stuff, eulogistic of the herrings which were the staple commodity of his native coast, and a curious book called The Unfortunate Traveller, dealing with the grand tour, and containing among other things the well-known romance (for romance it would seem to be) of Surrey the poet and his Geraldine. Where Nash stands eminent among the writers of the time is in his faculty of boisterous and burlesque abuse, which, in his famous lampoon upon Harvey, Have with you to Saffron Walden (Harvey's birthplace), displayed itself in a manner not easy to parallel elsewhere in English.

It is very hard to give in very brief space an account of the Martin Marprelate matter, yet without some such account extracts from it must be hardly intelligible. It began about the year 1588, chiefly owing to the action of a certain Reverend Nicholas Udall, a puritan divine who struck into the controversy between the Episcopal and Presbyterian parties in the Church, and embittered it by the use of language so violent that he himself was imprisoned and his printer's press seized. This printer, Waldegrave, enraged thereat, lent his art to members of the puritan sect even more violent than Udall (their exact identity is matter of controversy), and a fire of pamphlets was opened by them, the earliest being called The Epistle and The Epitome. In the first place, Dean Bridges of Salisbury and Bishop Cooper of Winchester, then other dignitaries, were assailed with real vigour and ability, but with the most unscrupulous partisanship, and in a dialect which for extravagance of abusive language had not been surpassed in the heat of the earlier Reformation controversies, and has scarcely been approached since. The partisans of the Church were fully equal to the occasion; and a counter fire of pamphlets, some of which are attributed with great probability to Nash, and others with hardly less to the Oxford dramatist and euphuist Lyly, was returned. The heat of the controversy lasted chiefly through three years—1588, 1589, and 1590; but it may be said in the widest sense to have endured for nearly seven—from 1586 to 1593, when Penry and Barrow, the supposed chiefs of the Martinists, were executed. Of the style of this singular controversy the extract will, I trust, give a sufficient idea. As to its matter, it is difficult to be more precise than this: that the object of the Martinist pamphleteers was to decry episcopacy by every possible description of personal abuse, applied to the holders and the defenders of the episcopal office, and that the object of their opponents of the same class (for men like Cooper and Bridges, still more like Whitgift and Hooker, stand in an entirely different category) was not so much to defend that office as to fling back in double measure the abuse upon 'Martin,' as the generic name went, and upon his known or supposed embodiments and partisans.

There can be few greater contrasts than between this furious ribaldry, as it too often is, and the mild mediocrity of Nicholas Breton. His claim to a place here (even if his merit be rated much lower than some have rated it) is, that he is the chief writer of the kind who is both in verse and prose a pamphleteer pure and simple. You cannot (at least I cannot) call Breton a poet, but he wrote immense quantities of verse, and in prose he pamphleted with such copiousness and persistence for nearly half a century, that it is clear there must have been money to be made by the practice.

The last of our chief single authors is Thomas Dekker, a very much greater man than Breton, though not so great in prose as in verse. He was somewhat later even in his beginning than the other writers I have noticed; and though his prose has not the formal merit or charm of his exquisite songs and his wonderful romantic character in drama, it is very interesting in matter. He paraphrases (The Bachelor's Banquet, The Gull's Hornbook) with remarkable freedom and skill; he chronicles plague years; he takes a hint from Greene, and extends and varies that author's satirical exposition of London tricks in a long and extremely vivid series of pamphlets, such as The Bellman of London, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, Lanthorn and Candle Light, News from Hell, and half a dozen others. In these, though of course a certain allowance must be made for the pressman's exaggeration in dealing with such subjects, there is a most singular and interesting picture of the lower and looser classes in England, at least in the English capital, at the time.

In this little book, after one or two changes of plan, I have finally decided on giving only entire pamphlets—a specimen of literary criticism from Lodge, of autobiographic romance from Greene, of politico-religious controversy from the Martin Marprelate series, of mingled self-panegyric and lampoon from Harvey, of burlesque from Nash, of paraphrase of foreign matter adapted to English conditions from Dekker, and of what may be called hack-work for the press from Breton. The annotation is deliberately limited to the removal of some of the most obvious stumbling-blocks to current reading. A full commentary on The Gull's Hornbook alone would fill another volume, and the object in these books is to give text not comment.

[I.—THOMAS LODGE]

(Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse has acquired something like fame in virtue of one of the answers to it—Sidney's Defence of Poetry. That interesting little book has been frequently reprinted of late, and some knowledge of it, and of Gosson's attack which caused it, may be taken as common. Lodge's attempt, made as a very young man, to do what Sidney did is far less familiar even to students. It was reprinted in 1853, and again in the rare and costly private issue by the Hunterian Club of Lodge's whole works; but the author of the introductory essay to that issue, my friend Mr. Gosse, has been somewhat unkind (I cannot say unjust) to it. It is, indeed, no great thing; but as a very early example of literary criticism by pamphlet, which has lacked the modern reprinting accorded to Webbe, Puttenham, Daniel, and other critics of the same time, I thought it might find appropriate place here.)