s a ludicrous contrast between "witless Gabriel and
ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the
great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up atheistical
questions, which Nash maliciously adds, "as I am afraid the earth
would swallow me if I should but rehearse." And at his close, Nash
bitterly regrets he has no more room; "else I should make Gabriel a
fugitive out of England, being the rauenousest slouen that ever lapt
porridge in noblemen's houses, where he has had already, out of two,
his mittimus of Ye may be gone! for he was a sower of seditious
paradoxes amongst kitchen-boys." Nash seems to have considered himself
as terrible as an Archilochus, whose satires were so fatal as to
induce the satirised, after having read them, to hang themselves.

How ill poor Harvey passed through these wit-duels, and how profoundly
the wounds inflicted on him and his brothers were felt, appears by his
own confessions. In his "Foure Letters," after some curious
observations on invectives and satires, from those of Archilochus,
Lucian, and Aretine, to Skelton and Scoggin, and "the whole venomous
and viperous brood of old and new raylers," he proceeds to blame even
his beloved friend the gentle Spenser, for the severity of his "Mother
Hubbard's Tale," a satire on the court. "I must needes say, Mother
Hubbard in heat of choller, forgetting the pure sanguine of her
Sweete Feary Queene, artfully ouershott her malcontent-selfe; as
elsewhere I have specified at large, with the good leaue of vnspotted
friendship.--Sallust and Clodius learned of Tully to frame artificiall
declamations and patheticall invectives against Tully himselfe; if
Mother Hubbard, in the vaine of Chawcer, happen to tel one canicular
tale, father Elderton and his son Greene, in the vaine of Skelton or
Scoggin, will counterfeit an hundred dogged fables, libles, slaunders,
lies, for the whetstone. But many will sooner lose their liues than
the least jott of their reputation. What mortal feudes, what cruel
bloodshed, what terrible slaughterdome have been committed for the
point of honour and some few courtly ceremonies."

The incidents so plentifully narrated in this Lucianic biography, the
very nature of this species of satire throws into doubt; yet they
still seem shadowed out from some truths; but the truths who can
unravel from the fictions? And thus a narrative is consigned to
posterity which involves illustrious characters in an in