It is to be regretted that Nash made no second adventure in pure
fiction. "Jack Wilton," now one of the rarest of his books, was never
reprinted in its own age.

How Nash was employed during the next two years, it is not easy to
conjecture. When we meet with him once more, the smouldering fire of his
quarrel with the Harveys had burst again into flame. "Have with you to
Saffron Walden," 1596, is devoted to the chastisement of "the reprobate
brace of brothers, to wit, witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." No
fresh public outburst on Harvey's part seems to have led to this
attack; but he bragged in private that he had silenced his licentious
antagonists. Nash admits that his opponent's last book "has been kept
idle by me, in a bye-settle out of sight amongst old shoes and boots
almost this two year." Harvey was known to have come from Saffron
Walden; Nash invites his readers to accompany him to that town to see
what they can discover, and he retails a good deal of lively scandal
about the rope-maker's sons. "Have with you" is perhaps the smartest and
is certainly the most readable of Nash's controversial volumes. It gives
us, too, some interesting fragments of autobiography. Harvey had accused
him of "prostituting his pen like a courtisan," and Nash makes this
curious and not very lucid statement in selfdefence:--

"Neither will I deny it nor will I grant it. Only thus far I'll go with
you, that twice or thrice in a month, when _res est angusta domi_, the
bottom of my purse is turned downward, and my conduit of ink will no
longer flow for want of reparations, I am fain to let my plough stand
still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these newfangled
Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous _villanellas_ and
_quipassas_, I prostitute my pen in hope of gain.... Many a fair day ago
have I proclaimed myself to the world Piers Penniless."

Gabriel Harvey must have felt, on reading "Have with you to Saffron
Walden," that his antagonist was right in saying that his pen carried
"the hot shot of a musket." Unfortunately, while Harvey was smarting
under these insulting gibes and jests, the jester himself got into
public trouble. Little is known of the circumstance which led the
Queen's Privy Council, in the summer of 1597, to throw Nash into the
Fleet Prison, but it was connected with the performance of a comedy
called "The Isle of Dogs," which gave offence to the authorities. This
play was not printed, and is