Calamities and Quarrels of Authors. Disraeli Isaac
have made as good a batch of poetrie as may be.”
Of Harvey’s list of friends he observes:—
126
“To a bead-roll of learned men and lords, he appeals, whether he be an asse or no?”
Harvey had said, “Thomas Nash, from the top of his wit looking down upon simple creatures, calleth Gabriel Harvey a dunce, a foole, an ideot, a dolt, a goose cap, an asse, and so forth; for some of the residue is not to be spoken but with his owne mannerly mouth; but he should have shewed particularlie which wordes in my letters were the wordes of a dunce; which sentences the sentences of a foole; which arguments the arguments of an ideot; which opinions the opinions of a dolt; which judgments the judgments of a goose-cap; which conclusions the conclusions of an asse.”[94]
Thus Harvey reasons, till he becomes unreasonable; one would have imagined that the literary satires of our English Lucian had been voluminous enough, without the mathematical demonstration. The banterers seem to have put poor Harvey nearly out of his wits; he and his friends felt their blows too profoundly; they were much too thin-skinned, and the solemn air of Harvey in his graver moments at their menaces is extremely ludicrous. They frequently called him Gabrielissime Gabriel, which quintessence of himself seems to have mightily affected him. They threatened to confute his letters till eternity—which seems to have put him in despair. The following passage, descriptive of Gabriel’s distresses, may excite a smile.
“This grand confuter of my letters says, ‘Gabriel, if there be any wit or industrie in thee, now I will dare it to the vttermost; write of what thou wilt, in what language thou wilt, and I will confute it, and answere it. Take Truth’s part, and I will proouve truth to be no truth, marching ovt of thy dung-voiding mouth.’ He will never leave me as long as he is able to lift a pen, ad infinitum; if I reply, he has a rejoinder; and for my brief triplication, he is prouided with a quadruplication, and so he mangles my sentences, hacks my arguments, wrenches my words, chops and changes my phrases, even to the disjoyning and dislocation of my whole meaning.”
Poor Harvey! he knew not that there was nothing real in ridicule, no end to its merry malice!
Harvey’s taste for hexameter verses, which he so unnaturally forced into our language, is admirably ridiculed. 127 Harvey had shown his taste for these metres by a variety of poems, to whose subjects Nash thus sarcastically alludes:—
“It had grown with him into such a dictionary custom, that no may-pole in the street, no wether-cocke on anie church-steeple, no arbour, no lawrell, no yewe-tree, 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 128 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 designed “to get a privilege betimes, forbidding of all others to sell waste-paper but himselfe.” The climax of the narrative, after many misfortunes, ends with Harvey being arrested by the printer, and confined to Newgate, where his sword is taken from him, to his perpetual disgrace. So much did Gabriel endure for having written a book against Tom Nash!
But Harvey might deny some of these ludicrous facts.—Will he deny? cries Nash—and here he has woven every tale the most watchful malice could collect, varnished for their full effect. Then he adds,
“You see I have brought the doctor out of request at court; and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him howted out of the Vniuersitie too, ere I giue him ouer.” He tells us Harvey was brought on the stage at Trinity-college, in “the exquisite comedie of Pedantius,” where, under “the finical fine schoolmaster, the just manner of his phrase, they stufft his mouth with; and the whole buffianisme throughout his bookes, they bolstered out his part with—euen to the carrying of his gowne, his nice gate in his pantofles, or the affected accent of his speech—Let him deny that there was a shewe made at Clarehall of him and his brothers, called Tarrarantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia; and another shewe of the little minnow his brother, at Peter-house, called Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a frensie.” The sequel is thus told:—“Whereupon Dick came and broke the college glass windows, and Dr. Perne caused him to be set in the stockes till the shewe was ended.”
This “Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a frensie,” was not 129 only the brother of one who ranked high in society and literature, but himself a learned professor. Nash brings him down to “Pigmey Dick, that lookes like a pound of goldsmith’s candles, who had like to commit folly last year with a milk-maid, as a friend of his very soberly informed me. Little and little-wittied Dick, that hath vowed to live and die in defence of Brutus and his Trojans.”[96] An Herculean feat of this “Duns furens,” Nash tells us, was his setting Aristotle with his heels upwards on the school-gates at Cambridge, and putting ass’s ears on his head, which Tom here records in perpetuam rei memoriam. But Wood, our grave and keen literary antiquary, observes—
“To let pass other matters these vain men (the wits) report of Richard Harvey, his works show him quite another person than what they make him to be.”
Nash then forms 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.