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contributed no less than three such works in 1589 and 1590: A Countercuff given to Martin Junior, The Return of Pasquil and Pasquil's Apology. A Mirror for Martinists, Martin's Month's Mind, and An Almond for a Parrot have also been assigned by some to Nash. Both Nash and Lyly are said to have ridiculed the Martinists in plays on the stage. The anonymous reply, Hay Any Work for Cooper, has been considered the best of the Marprelate tracts themselves; Lyly's Pap, and the pamphlets of Nash, the ablest of the replies. It is of interest to note that Bacon, safe man of compromise that he was, raised his voice against this as against other religious contentions in his able Controversies in the Church, 1589.7/ Of the style of these papers in general it is not necessary to speak: they range through all the degrees of satire and burlesque to a grossness and acridity of personal invective which was in keeping with the coarseness of the times. One of Nash's editors condemns his author's "fine nose for the carrion of anecdote," and for the "terrorism" and literary blackmail of his malignant and vehement denunciation of the Martinists. In violence and scurrility Nash little surpassed the violence of militant Puritanism.

But controversy was not the sum total of Nash's art in prose. His Christ's Tears over Jerusalem is a serious tract in which, under the guise of lamentation over the fate of Jerusalem, the author bewails the woes and shortcomings of his own city and age. In the social and satirical pamphlets, Pierce Penniless and Lenten Stuff or the Praise of Red Herring, we have Nash's more characteristic work. Quaint learning, a keen and observant eye, much knowledge of the world and its ways, an exuberant fund of humorous anecdote, a clever power to give a witty turn to thought and phrase, and a copious command of the language of encomium and especially that of vituperation: all these things are characteristics of the remarkable prose of Thomas Nash.

Lastly, there remains by Nash one piece of genuine fiction, Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveler. This vigorous burlesque and melodramatic story has the distinction, as M. Jusserand has pointed out, of being the earliest picaresque

romance in the English language and the only production of its kind in its age. The Unfortunate Traveler relates the adventures of a lively stripling, Jack Wilton, who lives successfully by his wits in various parts of Europe. He begins as a page with tricks upon a tapster for which he is soundly whipped as he deserves; but, rising in fortune, becomes servant to the Earl of Surrey, elopes with an Italian lady, and actually passes himself off for the earl. It is worthy of remembrance that the adventures of Surrey in this book, like Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier over a century after, were taken as actual facts by later writers and incorporated in sage biographies. Indeed Nash shares with Defoe that delightful art of "grave, imperturbable lying" or, to put it less opprobriously, of faithful likeness to actuality in trifling details which is one of the most precious possessions of the true novelist. It is impossible not to deplore that talents such as those of Nash - his power of vision, his mastery over language,his gaiety of spirit, eloquence, and rapid ease - could not have been better enlisted than in petty ephemeral pamphlet warfare and in the exploitation of passing literary fashions. But when all has been said to mark these limitations and conditions of his art, Nash must remain conspicuous, nay unexampled, in the annals of English prose not only for his inexhaustible Rabelaisian humor, his merry malevolence, and for his confident mastery over the vocabulary of Billingsgate, but likewise for his power over the telling realistic stroke and a copious flow of idiomatic vigorous English, alike removed from the alienisms of the Latinists, the niceties and affectations of the Euphuist, and the Arcadian flower of speech and ornament. Here is part of a humorous description by Nash of Harvey's bulky volume, Pierce's Supererogation:

O't is an unconscionable vast gorbellied volume, bigger bulked than a Dutch hoy, and far more boisterous and cumbersome than a pair of Swisser's omnipotent galleas breeches. But it should seem he is ashamed of the incomprehensible corpulency thereof himself, for at the end of the 199th page he begins with 100 again, to make it seem little (if I lie, you may look and convince me); and in half a quire of paper besides hath left the pages unfigured. I have read that the giant Abtaeus' shield asked a whole elephant's hide to cover

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it, bona fide I utter it, scarce a whole elephant's hide and a half would serve for a cover to this Gogmagog, Jewish Talmud of absurdities.

But one epistle thereof, to John Wolfe, the printer, I took and weighed in an ironmonger's scales, and it counterpoiseth a cade of herring and three Holland cheeses. You may believe me if you will, I was fain to lift my chamber door off the hinges, only to let it in, it was so fulsome a fat bona-roba and terrible Rounceval.

Lastly as to Elizabethan pamphleteers, we turn to Thomas Dekker, who to his repute as the follower of Greene in the drama we must add that of the chief successor of both Greene and Nash in the pamphlet. Of the life of Dekker word will be found elsewhere; suffice it here to say that Dekker was a voluminous writer of pamphlets, upwards of a score being listed and accredited to his authorship between 1598 and 1637, the year of his death. Nor is their range less than that of previous pamphleteers. Thus Canaan's Calamity and The Four Birds of Noah's Ark are devotional, respectively in verse and prose. The Wonderful Year is a vivid picture of the low life of London, especially of London lying sick with the plague, from which Defoe, in his Journal of the Plague, disdained not to borrow. The Bachelor's Banquet is a free adaptation of a well-known French tract, Les quinze joyes de marriage, while the delightfully satirical Gulls' Hornbook, in which the Jacobean gallant is anatomized in all his folly, is an equally free rewriting of Dedekind's Grobianus. Dekker worked once more the rich vein of Greene's conycatching tracts in his Bellman of London and its several additions and amplifications, and he diversified all with his ready wit, his fund of anecdote, and the occasional play of a poetical spirit which we must lament to find thus wasted on mere production of copy. Dekker's pamphlets are an invaluable fund of information on contemporary social manners and customs and have yet to offer much in their obscurer parts to a fuller understanding of the greater works of the age. For example, the single little chapter, now very well known, in The Gulls' Hornbook, which tells "how a gallant should behave himself at a playhouse," contains a mine of information concerning the theater of Shakespeare, its settings, the price of admission, how the gal

lants abused the privileges of the stage, how the unfortunate playwright and actor were beholden to them not only for their patronage but for permission to be heard at all, and other like

matters.

As I open at random one of the five volumes of a modern edition of Dekker's prose, I find an account of the poet's visit to the Bear Garden on the Bankside where the bear set upon by dogs puts the visitor in mind of "hell, the bear . . . like a black rugged soul that was damned and newly committed to the infernal churls, the dogs, like so many devils inflicting torments upon it." And much pity is moved in the author's humane breast when a company of creatures that had the shapes of men and the faces of Christians

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took the office of beadles upon them and whipped Monsieur Hunkes," the famous blind bear, with long sticks till the blood ran from his hairy shoulders. It was not for the bear that the later Puritans condemned the royal game of bear-baiting. In another place we read:

Thus sports that were invented for honest recreation, are by the wicked abusing of them, turned to men's confusion: and not only in these games before rehearsed, but also in those that are both more laudable and more lawful. For in the tennis court, cheating hath a hand; yea, and in shooting (which is the noblest exercise of our English nation), arrows do now and then fly with false feathers.

Could anything have a more modern ring?

But the pamphleteers could occasionally rise above contemporary conditions. Many are the passages of memorable eloquence that might be culled from their works. Here is a rhapsody of Nash on poets, with which this chapter may well conclude:

Destiny never defames herself but when she lets an excellent poet die. If there be any spark of Adam's paradised perfection yet embered up in the breasts of mortal men, certainly God hath bestowed that, his perfectest image, on poets. None can come so near to God in wit, none more contemn the world. Seldom have you seen any poet possessed with avarice; only verses he loves, nothing else he delights in. And as they contemn the world, so contrarily of the

THE PAMPHLET

mechanical world are none more contemned.

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Despised they are of

Their thoughts are

the world because they are not of the world. exalted above the world of ignorance and all earthly conceits. As sweet angelical choristers they are continually conversant in the heaven of arts. Heaven itself is but the highest height of knowlege. He that knows himself and all things else knows the means to be happy. Happy, thrice happy are they whom God hath doubled his spirit upon and given a double soul unto to be poets.