lace
Gabriel came ruffling it out, hufty tufty, in his suit of veluet--"
which he had "untrussed, and pelted the outside from the lining of
an old velvet saddle he had borrowed!" "The rotten mould of that
worm-eaten relique, he means, when he dies, to hang over his tomb for
a monument."[93] Harvey was proud of his refined skill in "Tuscan
authors," and too fond of their worse conceits. Nash alludes to
his travels in Italy, "to fetch him twopenny worth of Tuscanism,
quite renouncing his natural English accents and gestures, wrested
himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, painting himself like a
courtezan, till the Queen declared, 'he looked something like an
Italian!' At which he roused his plumes, pricked his ears, and run
away with the bridle betwixt his teeth." These were malicious
tales, to make his adversary contemptible, whenever the merry wits at
court were willing to sharpen themselves on him.

One of the most difficult points of attack was to break through that
bastion of sonnets and panegyrics with which Harvey had fortified
himself by the aid of his friends, against the assaults of Nash.
Harvey had been commended by the learned and the ingenious. Our
Lucian, with his usual adroitness, since he could not deny Harvey's
intimacy with Spenser and Sidney, gets rid of their suffrages by this
malicious sarcasm: "It is a miserable thing for a man to be said to
have had friends, and now to have neer a one left!" As for the others,
whom Harvey calls "his gentle and liberall friends," Nash boldly
caricatures the grotesque crew, as "tender itchie brained infants,
that cared not what they did, so they might come in print; worthless
whippets, and jack-straws, who meeter it in his commendation, whom he
would compare with the highest." The works of these young writers he
describes by an image exquisitely ludicrous and satirical:--

"These mushrumpes, who pester the world with their pamphlets, are like
those barbarous people in the hot countries, who, when they have bread
to make, doe no more than clap the dowe upon a post on the outside of
their houses, and there leave it to the sun to bake; so their
indigested conceipts, far rawer than anie dowe, at all adventures upon
the post they clap, pluck them off who will, and think they have made
as good a batch of poetrie as may be."

Of Harvey's list of friends he observes:--

"To a bead-roll of learned men and lords, he appeals, whether he be an
asse or no?"

Harvey had s