f them; another was
Le Sage who, before penning this translation, had revived and doubled
the popularity of the picaresque novel in publishing his "Gil
Blas."[253] In Germany, Grimmelshausen, following the same models, wrote
in the seventeenth century his "Simplicissimus." In England "Guzman" was
several times translated; "Lazarillo" was continually reprinted during
two centuries, and original romances of this kind were published here,
among others, by Thomas Nash, in the sixteenth, by Richard Head in the
seventeenth, by Defoe and Smollett, in the eighteenth century. The
initiative of Nash and his group was all the more important and
meritorious because before them the comic element was greatly wanting in
the English prose romance; amusing stories in the manner of the French
had found translators sometimes, but not imitators; the authors of
Arcadias were especially concerned in depicting noble sentiments, and
the gift of observation possessed by the English people ran the risk of
being for a long time exercised nowhere but on the stage, or in metrical
tales, or in moral essays.

II.

Thomas Nash made one of that group of young men, full of spirit, fire
and imagination, who shone during the first part of Shakespeare's
career, who fancied they could live by their pen, and who died
prematurely and miserably. Nash was about thirty-three years old when he
died in 1600; Marlowe was twenty-nine, Peele thirty, Greene thirty-two.

Nash was born at Lowestoft in 1567:[254] "The head towne in that iland
is Leystofe, in which, bee it knowne to all men, I was borne; though my
father sprung from the Nashes of Herefordshire;" a family that could
"vaunt longer petigrees than patrimonies." He studied at Cambridge, in
St. John's College, "in which house once I tooke up my inne for seven
yere together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and
ever was, the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that university."[255]
"Saint Johns in Cambridge," says he at another place, "at that time was
an universitie within it selfe ... having, as I have hearde grave men of
credite report, more candles light in it everie winter morning before
foure of the clocke than the foure of clocke bell gave stroakes."[256]
Like Greene and Sidney, he imbibed early a passionate taste for
literature; he learnt the classical languages and foreign ones too, at
least French and Italian, and enjoyed much miscellaneous reading; old
English literature, Mandev