it is
remarkable for its spirit and "go," qualities which may enable us to
forget how turbid, ungraceful, and harsh it is. Nash had now dropped
the mannerism of the Euphuists; he had hardly gained a style of his
own. "Pierce Penniless," with its chains of "letter-leaping metaphors,"
rattles breathlessly on, and at length abruptly ceases. Any sense of
the artistic fashioning of a sentence, or of the relative harmony of the
parts of a composition, was not yet dreamed of. But before we condemn
the muddy turbulence of the author, we must recollect that nothing
had then been published of Hooker, Raleigh, or Bacon in the pedestrian
manner. Genuine English prose had begun to exist indeed, but had not
yet been revealed to the world. Nash, as a lively portrait-painter in
grotesque, at this time, is seen at his best in such a caricature as
this, scourging "the pride of the Dane":--

"The most gross and senseless proud dolts are the Danes, who stand so
much upon their unwieldy burly-boned soldiery, that they account of
no man that hath not a battle-axe at his girdle to hough dogs with, or
wears not a cock's feather in a thrummed hat like a cavalier. Briefly,
he is the best fool braggart under heaven. For besides nature hath lent
him a flab-berkin face, like one of the four winds, and cheeks that sag
like a woman's dug over his chinbone, his apparel is so stuffed up with
bladders of taffaty, and his back like beef stuffed with parsley, so
drawn out with ribbands and devises, and blistered with light sarcenet
bastings, that you would think him nothing but a swarm of butterflies,
if you saw him afar off."

On the 3rd of September, 1592, Greene came to his miserable end, having
sent to the press from his deathbed those two remarkable pamphlets, the
"Groatsworth of Wit" and the "Repentance." For two years past, if we may
believe Nash, the profligate atheism of the elder poet had estranged his
friend, or at all events had kept him at a distance. But a feeling of
common loyalty, and the anger which a true man of letters feels when a
genuine poet is traduced by a pedant, led Nash to take up a very strong
position as a defender of the reputation of Greene. Gabriel Harvey,
although the friend of Spenser, is a personage who fills an odious place
in the literary history of the last years of Elizabeth. He was a scholar
and a university man of considerable attainments, but he was wholly
without taste, and he concentrated into vinegar a temper