e, he would ouerskip, without hayling in this
manner. After supper, if he chancst to play at cards with a queen of
harts in his hands, he would run upon men's and women's hearts all the
night."

And he happily introduces here one of the miserable hexameter conceits
of Harvey--

Stout hart and sweet hart, yet stoutest hart to be stooped.

Harvey's "Encomium Lauri" thus ridiculously commences,

What might I call this tree? A lawrell? O bonny lawrell,
Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto;

which Nash most happily burlesques by describing Harvey under a
yew-tree at Trinity-hall, composing verses on the weathercock of
Allhallows in Cambridge:--

O thou wether-cocke that stands on the top of Allhallows,
Come thy wales down, if thou darst, for thy crowne, and take the
wall on us.

"The hexameter verse (says Nash) I graunt to be a gentleman of an
auncient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clyme of our's
hee cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his
plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man
running vpon quagmires, vp the hill in one syllable and down the dale
in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which he
vaunts himself with amongst the Greeks and Latins."

The most humorous part in this Scribleriad, is a ludicrous narrative
of Harvey's expedition to the metropolis, for the sole purpose of
writing his "Pierce Supererogation," pitted against Nash's "Pierce's
Pennilesse." The facetious Nash describes the torpor and pertinacity
of his genius, by telling us he had kept Harvey at work--

"For seaven and thirtie weekes space while he lay at his printer's,
Wolfe, never stirring out of doors, or being churched all that
while--and that in the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the
ragingest furie of the last plague where there dyde above 1600 a weeke
in London, ink-squittring and saracenically printing against mee.
Three quarters of a year thus immured hee remained, with his spirits
yearning empassionment, and agonised fury, thirst of revenge,
neglecting soul and bodies health to compasse it--sweating and dealing
upon it most intentively."[95]

The narrative proceeds with the many perils which Harvey's printer
encountered, by expense of diet, and printing for this bright genius
and his friends, whose works "would rust and iron-spot paper to have
their names breathed over it;" and that Wolfe de