e.
We have Prynne's authority for believing that the first women who had
the audacity to appear before a London audience were French. This
happened in 1629 at the Blackfriars theatre. It is true that not long
after, to make up, as it were, for lost time, plays were performed in
England in which all the parts were taken by women; it is not known
whether on that occasion they were French.[267]

Another very important characteristic in Nash is the high ideal he has
shaped for himself of the art of writing, not only in verse, but in
plain prose. At a time when English prose was scarcely acknowledged to
be capable of artistic treatment, and when rules, regulations and
theories had, as is generally believed, very little hold upon writers,
it is interesting to notice that such an author as Nash, with his
stirring style and unbridled pen, with his prison and tavern life,
understood that words had a literary value of their own. They were not
to be taken at random, but chosen with care. His theory may on some
points be disputed, but it is certainly interesting to note that he had
a theory at all. First, he desires that a man shall write in his own
vein and not copy others, especially those who by their vogue and
peculiarities, such as Lyly or Greene, were easiest of reach and the
most tempting to imitate. He strongly defends himself from having ever
done anything of this sort; on the contrary, more than once appeals were
made to him to give judgment in literary matters:

"Is my style like Greenes, or my jeasts like Tarletons?

"Do I talke of any counterfeit birds, or hearbes or stones?... This I
will proudly boast ... that the vaine which I have ... is of my own
begetting and cals no man father in England but myselfe, neither
Euphues, nor Tarlton, nor Greene.

"Not Tarlton nor Greene but have beene contented to let my simple
judgment overrule them in some matters of wit. Euphues I read when I was
a little ape in Cambridge, and I then thought it was _ipse ille_: it may
be excellent still for ought I know, but I lookt not on it this ten
yeare: but to imitate it I abhorre."[268]

His vocabulary is very rich; he has always a variety of words at his
disposal and uses often two or three the better to impress our minds
with the idea in his own. He coins at need new words or fetches them
from classical or foreign languages. He does not do this in an off-hand
way, but on purpose and wilfully; he possessed much of that curious care
f