when that keen instrument cuts what cannot be untied. “The Rehearsal” wrote down the unnatural taste for the rhyming heroic tragedies, and brought the nation back from sound to sense, from rant to passion. More important events may be traced in the history of Ridicule. When a certain set of intemperate Puritans, in the reign of Elizabeth, the ridiculous reformists of abuses in Church and State, congregated themselves under the literary 116 nom de guerre of Martin Mar-prelate, a stream of libels ran throughout the nation. The grave discourses of the archbishop and the prelates could never silence the hardy and concealed libellers. They employed a moveable printing-press, and the publishers perpetually shifting their place, long escaped detection. They declared their works were “printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing priests;” or they were “printed over sea, in Europe, within two furlongs of a bouncing priest, at the cost and charges of Martin Mar-prelate, gent.” It was then that Tom Nash, whom I am about to introduce to the reader’s more familiar acquaintance, the most exquisite banterer of that age of genius, turned on them their own weapons, and annihilated them into silence when they found themselves paid in their own base coin. He rebounded their popular ribaldry on themselves, with such replies as “Pap with a hatchet, or a fig for my godson; or, crack me this nut. To be sold, at the sign of the Crab-tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat lane.”[81] Not less biting was his “Almond for a Parrot, or an Alms for Martin.” Nash first silenced Martin Mar-prelate, and the government afterwards hanged him; Nash might be vain of the greater honour. A ridiculer then is the best champion to meet another ridiculer; their scurrilities magically undo each other.
But the abuse of ridicule is not one of the least calamities of literature, when it withers genius, and gibbets whom it ought to enshrine. Never let us forget that Socrates before his judges asserted that “his persecution originated in the licensed raillery of Aristophanes, which had so unduly influenced the popular mind during several years!” And thus a fictitious Socrates, not the great moralist, was condemned. Armed with the most licentious ridicule, the Aretine of our own country and times has proved that its chief magistrate was not protected by the shield of domestic and public virtues; a false and distorted image of an intelligent monarch could cozen the gross many, and aid the purposes of the subtle few.
There is a plague-spot in ridicule, and the man who 117 is touched with it can be sent forth as the jest of his country.
The literary reign of Elizabeth, so fertile in every kind of genius, exhibits a remarkable instance, in the controversy between the witty Tom Nash and the learned Gabriel Harvey. It will illustrate the nature of the fictions of ridicule, expose the materials of which its shafts are composed, and the secret arts by which ridicule can level a character which seems to be placed above it.
Gabriel Harvey was an author of considerable rank, but with two learned brothers, as Wood tells us, “had the ill luck to fall into the hands of that noted and restless buffoon, Tom Nash.”
Harvey is not unknown to the lover of poetry, from his connexion with Spenser, who loved and revered him. He is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the “Faery Queen,” who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney: and, besides his intimacy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an erudite scholar, and distinguished as a poet. Such a man could hardly be contemptible; and yet, when some little peculiarities become aggravated, and his works are touched by the caustic of the most adroit banterer of that age of wit, no character has descended to us with such grotesque deformity, exhibited in so ludicrous an attitude.
Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practised till it was found sufficiently ridiculous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste; and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit. He had, perhaps, the foibles of a man who was clearing himself from obscurity; he prided himself on his family alliances, while he fastidiously looked askance on the trade of his father—a rope-manufacturer.
He was somewhat rich in his apparel, according to the rank in society he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself—and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two brothers—one a divine and the other a physician—became students of astronomy; 118 then an astronomer usually ended in an almanac-maker, and above all, in an astrologer—an avocation which tempted a man to become a prophet. Their “sharp and learned judgment on earthquakes” drove the people out of their senses (says Wood); but when nothing happened of their predictions, the brothers received a severe castigation from those great enemies of prophets, the wits. The buffoon, Tarleton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them at the theatre;[82] Elderton, a drunken ballad-maker, “consumed his ale-crammed nose to nothing in bear-bating them with bundles of ballads.”[83] One on the earthquake commenced with “Quake! quake! quake!” They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash humorously describes their fanciful panic, “when they sweated and were not a haire the worse.” Thus were the three learned brothers beset by all the town-wits; Gabriel had the hardihood, with all undue gravity, to charge pell-mell among the whole knighthood of drollery; a circumstance probably alluded to by Spenser, in a sonnet addressed to Harvey—
| “Harvey, the happy above happier men, I read; that sitting like a looker-on Of this worlde’s stage, dost note with critique pen The sharp dislikes of each condition; And, as one carelesse of suspition, Ne fawnest for the favour of the great; Ne fearest foolish reprehension Of faulty men, which daunger to thee threat, But freely doest of what thee list, entreat, Like a great lord of peerlesse liberty.—” |
The “foolish reprehension of faulty men, threatening Harvey with danger,” describes that gregarious herd of town-wits in the age of Elizabeth—Kit Marlow, Robert Greene, Dekker, Nash, &c.—men of no moral principle, of high passions, and the most pregnant Lucianic wits who ever 119 flourished at one period.[84] Unfortunately for the learned Harvey, his “critique pen,” which is strange in so polished a mind and so curious a student, indulged a sharpness of invective which would have been peculiar to himself, had his adversary, Nash, not quite outdone him. Their pamphlets foamed against each other, till Nash, in his vehement invective, involved the whole generation of the Harveys, made one brother more ridiculous than the other, and even attainted the fair name of Gabriel’s respectable sister. Gabriel, indeed, after the death of Robert Greene, the crony of Nash, sitting like a vampyre on his grave, sucked blood from his corpse, in a memorable narrative of the debaucheries and miseries of this town-wit. I throw into the note the most awful satirical address I ever read.[85] It became necessary to dry up the 120 floodgates of these rival ink-horns, by an order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The order is a remarkable fragment of our literary history, and is thus expressed:—“That all Nashe’s bookes and Dr. Harvey’s bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found, and that none of the said bookes be ever printed hereafter.”
This extraordinary circumstance accounts for the excessive rarity of Harvey’s “Foure Letters, 1592,” and that literary scourge of Nash’s, “Have with you to Saffron-Walden (Harvey’s residence), or Gabriel Harvey’s Hunt is vp, 1596;” pamphlets now as costly as if they consisted of leaves of gold.[87]
Nash, who, in his other works, writes in a style as flowing as Addison’s, with hardly an obsolete vestige, has rather injured this literary invective by the evident burlesque he affects of Harvey’s pedantic idiom; and for this Mr. Malone has hastily censured him, without recollecting the aim of this modern Lucian.[88] The delicacy of irony; the sous-entendu, that subtlety of indicating what is not told; all that poignant satire, which is the keener for its polish, were 121 not practised by our first vehement satirists; but a bantering masculine humour, a style stamped in the heat of fancy, with all the life-touches of strong individuality, characterise these licentious wits. They wrote
