rvent excitements of young heads) I rashly
assailed: yet now better advised, and of his perfections more
confirmedly persuaded, unfeignedly I entreat of the whole world from my
pen his worth may receive no impeachment. All acknowledgments of
abundant scholarship, courteous, well-governed behaviour, and ripe,
experienced judgment do I attribute to him."

We have already seen with what malignity Harvey trampled upon the corpse
of Greene, and he received this apology of Nash in a corresponding
spirit; for instead of accepting it, in his "New Letter of Notable
Contents," 1593, he rejects it with scorn: "Riotous vanity (he replies)
was wont to root so deeply that it could hardly be unrooted; and where
reckless impudency taketh possession, it useth not very hastily to be
dispossessed. What say you to a spring of rankest villainy in February,
and a harvest of ripest divinity in May? But what should we hereafter
talk any more of paradoxes or impossibilities, when he that penned the
most desperate and abominable pamphlet of 'Strange News,' and disgorged
his stomach of as poisonous rancour as ever was vomited in print, within
few months is won, or charmed, or enchanted, (or what metamorphosis
should I term it?) to astonish carnal minds with spiritual
meditations," &c. Such a reception of well-intended and
eloquently-written amends was enough to make Nash repent even his
repentance, as far as Gabriel Harvey was concerned.[15]

Of the popularity of Nash as a writer some notion may be formed from a
fact he himself mentions in his "Have with you to Saffron Walden," that
between 1592, when his "Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil"
was first printed, and 1596 it "passed through the pikes of at least six
impressions." How long his reputation as a satirist survived him may be
judged from the fact that in 1640 Taylor the Water Poet published a
tract, which had for its second title "Tom Nash, his Ghost (the old
Martin queller), newly rouz'd:" and in _Mercurius Anti-pragmaticus_,
from Oct. 12 to Oct. 19, 1647, is the following passage: "Perhaps you
will be angry now, and when you steal forth disguised, in your next
intelligence thunder forth threatenings against me, and be as satirical
in your language as ever was your predecessor Nash, who compiled a
learned treatise in the praise of a red herring."

Only two plays in which Nash had any concern have come down to us: his
"Isle of Dogs," before noticed, was probably never print