o have actually
perused the works of Nash may probably be counted on the fingers of
two hands. Most of these productions are uncommon to excess, one or two
exist in positively unique examples. There is no use in arguing against
such a fact as this. If Nash had reached, or even approached, the
highest order of merit, he would have been placed, long ere this, within
the reach of all. Nevertheless, his merits, relative if not positive,
were great. In the violent coming of age of Elizabethan literature,
his voice was heard loudly, not always discordantly, and with an accent
eminently personal to himself. His life, though shadowy, has elements of
picturesqueness and pathos; his writings are a storehouse of oddity and
fantastic wit

It has been usual to class Nash with the Precursors of Shakespeare, and
until quite lately it was conjectured that he was older than Greene and
Peele, a contemporary of Lodge and Chapman. It is now known that he
was considerably younger than all these, and even than Marlowe and
Shakespeare. Thomas Nash, the fourth child of the Rev. William Nash, who
to have been curate of Lowestoft in Suffolk, was baptized in that
town in November, 1567. The Nashes continued to live in Lowestoft, where
the father died in 1603, probably three years after the death of his son
Thomas. Of the latter we hear nothing more until, in October, 1582, at
the age of fifteen, he matriculated as a sizar of St. John's College,
Cambridge. Cooper says that he was admitted a scholar on the Lady
Margaret's foundation in 1584. He remained at Cambridge, in unbroken
residence, until July, 1589, "seven year together, lacking a quarter,"
as he tells us positively in "Lenten Stuff."

Cambridge was the hotbed of all that was vivid and revolutionary in
literature at that moment, and Robert Greene was the centre of literary
Cambridge. When Nash arrived, Greene, who was seven years his senior,
was still in residence at his study in Clare Hall, having returned from
his travels in Italy and Spain, ready, in 1583, to take his degree as
master of arts. He was soon, however, to leave for London, and it is
unlikely that a boy of sixteen would be immediately admitted to
the society of those "lewd wags" who looked up to the already
distinguished Greene as to a master. But Greene, without doubt, made
frequent visits to his university, and on one of these was probably
formed that intimate friendship with Nash which lasted until near the
elder poet's