overrule those that followed them, as well for
the quantities of syllables, as number of feet, and the like:
their only examples going for current payment, and standing
instead of laws, and rules with the posterity."

In Harvey, more perhaps than anywhere else in prose, appears the abusive
exaggeration, not humorous or Rabelaisian, but simply rancorous and dull,
which mars so much Elizabethan work. In order not to fall into the same
error ourselves, we must abstain from repeating the very strong language
which has sometimes been applied to his treatment of dead men, and such
dead men as Greene and Marlowe, for apparently no other fault than their
being friends of his enemy Nash. It is sufficient to say that Harvey had
all the worst traits of "donnishness," without having apparently any notion
of that dignity which sometimes half excuses the don. He was emphatically
of Mr. Carlyle's "acrid-quack" genus.

Thomas Nash will himself hardly escape the charge of acridity, but only
injustice or want of discernment will call him a quack. Unlike Harvey, but
like Greene and Lodge, he was a verse as well as a prose writer. But his
verse is in comparison unimportant. Nor was he tempted to intersperse
specimens of it in his prose work. The absolutely best part of that
work--the Anti-Martinist pamphlets to be noticed presently--is only
attributed to him conjecturally, though the grounds of attribution are very
strong. But his characteristics are fully evident in his undoubted
productions. The first of these in pamphlet form is the very odd thing
called _Pierce Penniless_ [the name by which Nash became known], _his
Supplication to the Devil_. It is a kind of rambling condemnation of
luxury, for the most part delivered in the form of burlesque exhortation,
which the mediaeval _sermons joyeux_ had made familiar in all European
countries. Probably some allusions in this refer to Harvey, whose
pragmatical pedantry may have in many ways annoyed Nash, a Cambridge man
like himself. At any rate the two soon plunged into a regular battle, the
documents of which on Nash's side are, first a prognostication, something
in the style of Rabelais, then a formal confutation of the _Four Letters_,
and then the famous lampoon entitled _Have with you to Saffron Walden_
[Harvey's birthplace], of which here is a specimen:--

"His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where
presenting himself in all the colours of t