Exit Gabriel
Harvey.

Walden," published in 1596, Nash describes Gabriel Harvey as "of the age of forti-eight or vpwards, (Turpe senex miles, tis time for such an olde foole to leaue playing the swash-buckler)." Spenser's age then was about fourty-four. Nash's object was to represent Harvey as old as possible, and Harvey's formal gravity would add two or three years to the appearance of his age. It has been shown that he was only about a year older than Spenser. His age, therefore, at this date was forty-five or forty-six. He had obtained his licence to the degree of D.C.L. in July, 1585, when he was for a short time Master of Trinity Hall, but Doctor Thomas Preston--author of the play "Cambyses "-was put in his place by royal mandate, and Gabriel Harvey sought in vain for the appointment after Preston's death, on the first of June, 1598. The rest of Harvey's life was private, and he died in 1630 at the age of about eighty. Nash died, probably, in 1600, at the age of thirty-three. A young poet, Charles Fitzgeoffrey-who graduated M.A. at Oxford in July, 1600, and had published at Oxford in 1596 a poem on "Sir Francis Drake, his Honorable Lifes Commendation and his Tragical Deathes Lamentation "-published in 1601 a volume of Latin epigrams and epitaphs, as "Caroli Fitzgeofridi Affaniæ; sive Epigrammatum libri tres; Ejusdem Cenotaphia." Among the pieces in this book is an epitaph on Thomas Nash, then dead, of whom it is said that Death, before taking Nash, took from him the use of tongue and pen. Had he retained those arms, Death would have feared death from him, Ipsa quidem metuit mors truculenta mori.

"Summer's Last Will and Testament"

is an occasional masque written in the late summer of a year of sickness, when the queen was away from London, and the chief part of dying Summer's Will was that the seasons following should do good service

"E. W." ix. 63.

to her and advance her happiness when she returned. The scene of action was in the hall of a great lord at Croydon, who is once called his Grace. No house at Croydon answered to these conditions but the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift was attached to Croydon, and in the life of Whitgift written by Sir George Paule, who was Comptroller of his Household, we are told that "every year he entertained the queen at one of his houses, so long as he was Archbishop; and some years twice or thrice; where all things were performed in so seemly an order that she went thence always exceedingly well pleased." She called Whitgift her Black Husband and his men her servants. Since the "Summer's Last Will and Testament" is homage to the queen, we may fairly accept a general opinion that Nash wrote this piece to be acted in the archbishop's palace at Croydon about harvest-time in the plague year 1593. It is an opinion well supported by internal evidence that falls only a little short of proof. Nash, who had been a champion against Martin Marprelate, wrote in the same year "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," and may have written some or all of it while sheltered within the archbishop's great house at Croydon.

Toy, the jester, personating Henry VIII.'s fool, Will Summers, always on the stage, furnishes the prologue, epilogue, and running comment, addresses or discusses the boy-actors, and otherwise disports himself. Dying Summer enters, leaning on the shoulders of Autumn and Winter, followed by a train of satyrs and wood-nymphs, with a song. Summer, about to resign his sway, has for a month been languishing, and would have died ere now,

"But that Eliza, England's beauteous Queen,
On whom all seasons prosperously attend,
Forbad the execution of my fate

Until her joyful progress was expired."

Summer calls in succession, through Vertumnus, for Ver, Solstitium, Sol, Orion, Harvest, Bacchus, to give account of the service each has rendered. They come in forms and with following according to their characters, yielding variety of argument and song and chorus. Ver and her following dance and sing with irresistible high spirits Orion speaks large praise of dogs, and Bacchus is intemperate. After reasoning with Autumn and Winter upon ills of life, including meddlers with affairs of State, Summer sings his death-song in six stanzas, each closing with the two-lined burden of the first

"Adieu, farewell earth's bliss,

This world uncertain is,

Fond are life's lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys:
None from his darts can fly,

I am sick, I must die:

Lord, have mercy upon us!"

Back

Christmas and Backwinter-Winter that runs into Spring-had been sent for, and are brought in. Christmas is a wretched niggard. winter seldom comes, "but when he comes he pincheth to the proof." Then, before dying, Summer makes his will.

"My crown I have disposed already of.

Item, I give my withered flowers and herbs
Unto dead corses, for to deck them with.
My shady walks to great men's servitors,
Who in their masters' shadows walk secure.
My pleasant open air, and fragrant smells,
To Croydon and the grounds abutting round.
My heat and warmth to toiling labourers,
My long days to bound men and prisoners,"

with other such bequests.

"And finally,-O, words, now cleanse your course!-
Unto Eliza that most sacred Dame,

Whom none but Saints and angels ought to name,

All my fair days remaining I bequeath

To wait upon her till she be returned."

High charge is given to Autumn and to Winter on the queen's behalf. Then Summer dies, and is carried out by the satyrs and wood nymphs that came in with him. They sing as they go two stanzas on the mourning of London, each closed with the litany, "From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us!"

In 1594 Nash published a short pamphlet dedicated to Elizabeth, the daughter of his patrons, Sir George and Lady Carey, on "The Terrors of the Night. Or A Discourse on Apparitions." This piece is based on the old association of ill spirits with the darkness, and includes a pleasant talk of evil spirits who can swarm about us infinitely small-"Infinite millions of them

"The Terrors of the Night."

will hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose "-spirits of earth and air, dreams, witches, and other night-fears. The Plagues of life are in the record, and in this connection Nash speaks of the plague of

"long depending hope frivolously defeated, than which there is no greater miserie on earth and so per consequens no men on earth more miserable than courtiers. It is a cowardly feare that is not resolute inough to despaire. It is like a pore hunger starved wretch at sea, who still in expectation of a good voyage, endures more miseries than Iob. He that writes this can tell, for he neuer had good voyage in his life but one, and that was to a fortunate blessed Island nere those pinnacle rocks called the Needles. O it is a purified Continent, and a fertil plot fit to seat another Paradice, where or in no place the image of the ancient hospitalitie is to be found. While I liue I will praise it and extoll it, for the true magnificence and continued honourable bountie that I saw there."

Sir George Carey, after the death of Sir Edward Horsey, in 1582, was appointed Captain-General of the Isle of Wight. He lived in Carisbrooke Castle, where his hospitality was liberal, his energy was great. It was he who arranged the defences of the island in the year of the Armada. At Carisbrooke Thomas Nash was among his guests. Liking for Nash was natural in a man of whom it is said by Sir John Oglander that "in Sir George Carey's time an attorney coming to settle in the Island was, by his command, with a pound of lighted candles at his breech lighted, with bells about his legs, hunted owte of the island."

In 1594, also, Thomas Nash published his only novel, finished in the early summer of 1593,

"The Vnfortunate Traveller, or, The Life of lacke Wilton."

This lively piece is not a love-pamphlet after the manner of Greene's novels, that uphold the worthiness of women. Life in it is a little rascally, and love is lewd. Jack Wilton started in the world as a great man's page, with a page's conscience. He travelled, and came home with privilege to tell lies ever after. Travellers' tales were, in Elizabeth's

time, proverbial for their large draughts upon faith. Jack Wilton's is such a traveller's tale as Jack Falstaff might have spun in his youth when he was page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, if after travel he had come home and told his adventures as shoeing-horn to a tankard of sack by the fire at the Boar's Head. Jack Wilton, who is supposed to be telling his own story, says that he was a page in the camp of Henry VIII. at the sieges of Tournay and Terouenne (1513), and boasts first of his tricks upon the camp merchant of ale and cider, whom he cheated out of his store, and on a foolish captain, whom he persuaded to go into the French quarters and make his fortune by killing the French king to please the King of England. Thereby the foolish captain got for himself torture on the wheel from the French, was whipped out of the French lines as a traitor, and then hanged in the English camp as a deserter. Such incidents, told with much enjoyment, open the traveller's tale with a clear suggestion of the teller's levity. They shock nobody, because Jack is blowing bubbles— not recording facts. Jack Wilton then tells about the sweating sickness. "I have seen," he says, "an old woman at that season having three chins wipe them all away one after another, as they melted to water, and left herself nothing of a mouth but an upper chap." That war ended, Jack Wilton says, "I flew me over to Munster in Germanie, which an Anabaptistical brother named John Leiden kept at that instant against the Emperor and the Duke of Saxony." He tells with a fine vigour of exaggeration details of a battle in which the Anabaptists were destroyed. There was no such battle; they were massacred during an eight-day sack of the town (1535).

As there was no more honourable war in Christendom then toward, Jack Wilton says that he came back barefoot to England, and at Middleborough met with his late master, Lord Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and turned back to go abroad again with him. Surrey was going as a knight-errant to challenge through Italy, and especially in Florence, all who said that the charms of Geraldine were not supreme. This is, of course, invention; Surrey never was in Italy. Jack Wilton met with Sir Thomas More and Erasmus on his way to Italy; and, in Italy, Cornelius Agrippa, who showed Geraldine to the Earl of Surrey in a magic mirror, whereupon follows the ditty Surrey is supposed to have made upon that subject. Surrey's tournament at Florence is described, with extravagant imaginations of the trappings of the horses.

Surrey caused his dear Wilton to travel as the earl, and took upon himself to be his servant, Brunquell. In such form they had a curious adventure with a pander and a courtesan at Venice, took of them counterfeit gold, and were imprisoned for passing a piece of it. Jack