The age offered many more prizes
to win, and life in London became a struggle for self-advancement.
to win, and life in London became a struggle for self-advancement.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v04
375.
3 Ante, vol. III, chap. XIX.
4 Barnabe Rich catches the spirit of the times when he talks of this quicke sprited
age, when so many excellent wittes are endeavouring by their pennes to set upp lightes,
and to give the world new eyes to see into deformitie. ' The Honestie of this Age, 1614.
5 For the prose fiction of Lodge, Greene and Nashe, see vol. II of the present
work, chap. xvi; for their plays, see vol. v.
## p. 318 (#340) ############################################
318
London and Popular Literature
pecuniary embarrassments of young men, for gradually involving
the spendthrift in debt and then using him as a decoy to enmesh
others, were a theme of deadly interest to a large number of
Londoners and offered endless opportunity for wit and narrative
power. Although usurers had been an object of satire for more
than a century, Lodge was the first systematically to expose
their practices. But he still, in a style designed to appeal to the
educated, relies for literary effect on the insincerities of the
euphuistic novel, and presents a narrative full of apostrophes,
harangues and reflections.
One of the next efforts was an examination of the age by
Thomas Nashe, in The Anatomie of Absurditie (1588). The work
is a prolix and erratic satire, coloured by touches of euphuism
and confused by innumerable digressions. But, amongst an arraign-
ment of feminine character, in the manner of The Schole-howse of
Women, a defence of fabulists, an interpretation of Ovid's Meta-
morphoses, a discussion on diet, an invective against ballad-mongers
and the customary defence of poetry, the writer vigorously criticises
classical pedantry as one of the great errors of the age; while his
thoughts on study and conduct, with the assertion that the fruits
of our private studie ought to appeare in our publique behaviour,'
and the warning to think not common things unworthy of thy
knowledge,' foreshadow a literature of counsel and reflection which
Bacon was to realise. But, for the moment, London was agitated
by controversy, and the public looked for satire and invective only.
So Nashe turned to the ruder and more profitable trade of
lampoonist.
Four years later, Robert Greene changed the current of prose
literature, discarding all the canons of euphuism by which he
himself had made his reputation. But even Greene did not at
once discover the want of his age. He began by appealing to the
old English love of felonious ingenuity and humorous knavery in
the coney-catching pamphlets already described? . He gives but
few facts of thief life, and these are mostly drawn from the second
part of Awdeley's Fraternitye and Parker's Manifest Detection
of Dice-Play? The bulk of his work is taken up with 'pithy and
pleasant’tales, which lack the picturesque touches and sociological
interest of Harman's great work. But, at the same time, his
pamphlets are most significant. To begin with, he is no longer
writing of the organised vagrants who infested the country, but of
the versatile London thief, a modern type, whose existence was
1 Ante, vol. II, chap. XVI, pp. 360-2.
* Ibid. chap. v, pp. 98 and 102.
## p. 319 (#341) ############################################
Greene's Social Pamphlets 319
bound up with the development of the capital. And, again, though
this realistic interest in city life has compelled even a successful
euphuist to denude his diction of all ornamentation, yet the frame-
work of his pamphlets shows the skill of the professional author.
His methods of presentation are well illustrated by The Defence
of Conny-catching. The pamphlet claims to be a plea for the dis-
reputable thief, and contends that worse cozenage was to be
found among the respectable classes! Yet this argument merely
served as a pretext for exposing the dishonesty of usurers, millers,
butchers, lawyers and tailors, and, still more, as an excuse for
presenting the public with some admirable tales. Apparently,
the success of these rather superficial pamphlets led him to widen
his scope, and to include the practices of female criminals. This
new material afforded an opening for novelty of form. Greene,
always in search of variety, revived the medieval dialogue, presented
the public with A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a
Shee Conny-catcher, in which the interlocutors discuss the compara-
tive merits of male and female with a view to theft and blackmail.
Though a burlesque debate, this tract really penetrates deeply into
the sociology of crime, by considering the questions of sex and
character which underlie the superficial dexterity of coney-catching.
This series of pamphlets marks Greene's apprenticeship in
social literature. Having exhausted his material, he produced,
in July 1592, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, in which he
reaches his consummation. It has already been shown? how the
greater part of the tract is taken up with a dispute between the
courtier and the tradesman; and how the jury of tradesmen
brought in to decide the case enables Greene to pass in review
representatives of differing trades and pursuits.
The value of the pamphlet consists in the new life and meaning
that Greene puts into old forms of thought. Tradesmen had been
victims of caricature since the early Middle Ages:. The attack
on the fashionable spendthrift, the central figure of A Quip, is
part of the immemorial feud between men of wealth and men of
1 The idea was quite in keeping with the spirit of the sixteenth century: see below,
Nashe's Lenten Stufe, and bibl. under Burlesque Encomia. Parson Hyberdine had
delivered a sermon in praise of thievery. Many broadside ballads sang the joys of
vagabondage. The Defence of Conny-catching claims to be a counterblast to Greene's
preceding pamphlets, Notable Discovery and the later parts of Conny-catching.
But those booklets are gratuitously commended by their self-constituted antagonist,
and our author is addressed with a respectful suavity, quite out of keeping with the
sixteenth century spirit of controversy, but quite in keeping with Greene's methods of
self-advertisement.
? Ante, vol. 111, chap. xvi, p. 361.
3 Ibid. chap. v, p. 84.
## p. 320 (#342) ############################################
320 London and Popular Literature
learning, and had already found expression with Sir Thomas More
and Roger Ascham. The idea of reviewing the representatives
of each trade and profession had been used again and again by
pamphleteers since The Ship of Fools, to go no further back!
Yet the pamphlet marks a fresh stage in the development of
popular literature. The types of society are brought into im-
mediate contact with the social controversy which culminated in
the civil war. Moreover, their portraiture is new. Character
sketches arise as soon as a writer has a point of view from which
to contemplate a class or a type. In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the
aim of the descriptions is sociological ; in Higden and, later, with
Andrew Boorde', the trend is ethnological and political. Awdeley
and Harman use the character sketch to distinguish the different
departments in the art of roguery, which at first sight appears
homogeneous. But very few writers before Greene had embodied
the moral or humorous aspect of a class in the individuality or
mannerisms of its representatives. If we take the knight, the tailor,
or the usurer, we recognise them at once as living personalities.
And what draws or repels us is the man's occupation, or, rather,
Greene's conception of his occupation. Henceforth, Londoners
were to look for the glory or shame of their society in the descrip-
tion of familiar figures which thronged the street or St Paul's.
But Greene's most profound commentary on his age is the
Groatsworth of Wit. The outline of the story is probably
reminiscent of readings in Terence, and the main idea may well
have been suggested by the Dutch Latin comedies of the Prodigal
Son. But autobiographical touches are unmistakable. We see
there the evil effects of a boyhood spent in an unsympathetic home,
hopelessly out of touch with the new movements of the time. Such
an environment was not likely to prepare a sensitive, impulsive youth
for the dissipations of the university or the storm and stress of
Elizabethan London. Greene represented a fairly numerous class
of men whom an undiscriminating study of Latin and Italian poetry
led to the hiding of debauchery under an appearance of art and
culture. The spectacle of the perfidious Lamilia, composing love
ditties and accepting courtship couched in Ovidian and Terentian
pp. 482–4.
? Ante, vol. III, chap. v, bibl. ,
? De Proprietatibus Rerum (first printed c. 1470).
3 Polychronicon, ptd by Caxton, 1482.
The fyrst boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, pub. 1547.
5 For this influence on Greene's repentance-novels, see J. D. Wilson's article in
The Library, Oct. 1909.
6 De Arte Amandi.
## p. 321 (#343) ############################################
The Seven Deadly Sins
321
preciousness, is an unconscious allegory on the fundamental im-
perfection of the renascence.
Greene had discovered the way to satisfy London's interest in
itself. His mantle fell on Nashe, who, at the termination of the
Marprelate controversy, was driven to look for other means of
subsistence. He returned to the review of society with a keener
and wider perception of life, a satirical vein not uncoloured by
Juvenal and Rabelais and the mastery of an exuberant and
torrential style, in which argot blends with Latinisms. Like
Greene, he cast about for an attractive setting. The devil was
still an object of ribald curiosity, so Nashe associated his satire
with that suggestive personality, and, in Pierce Penilesse, his
Supplication to the Divell, he represents the literary man as a
proverbial lackpenny addressing a complaint to the devil, since
appeals to the church are useless. But, though the supplication
contains contemporary portraiture of life and character', yet
old forms of thought were too deeply ingrained in popular senti-
ment to be eluded. Nashe reverted to the conception of the
seven deadly sins. During the storm of the reformation, the ‘sins'
were banished from literature, but they reappear, towards the end
of the century, as a comic interlude in Marlowe's Faustus, and as
a vehicle for political invective and elaborate imagery in Spenser's
Faerie Queene? Nashe presents all the humours of the age and
his own disillusionments and aspirations under these ‘sins. ' In
this expansive age, when love of travel blended with national
self-consciousness, Londoners took a critical interest in foreign
types. So Nashe vividly portrays the pride peculiar to the
Spaniard, the Italian and the Frenchman. Dutchmen, unwelcome
in England because of their commercial competition, are over-
whelmed with invectives. In due course, the writer passes on
to Gluttony, and then to Drunkenness, in which the Dutch are
again satirised. "The nurse of all this enormitie (as of all evills)
is Idleness,' the type of which is the stationer who referred all
would-be customers to his shop-boy with a jerk of his thumb,
but was full of activity at meal-time. Covetousness is not treated;
but the supplication is followed by a disquisition on devilry and
spiritualism, at that moment one of the burning questions of
the day.
But this brilliant and felicitous commentary on contemporary
London was by no means uninfected by the contentious spirit of
· Ante, vol. II, p. 362. ? F. Rogers, The Seven Deadly Sins, 1907, chap. VI.
3 See bibl. under Witch-controversy.
E. L. IV. CH. XVI.
21
## p. 322 (#344) ############################################
322 London and Popular Literature
the age. The city was still echoing with the Marprelate contro-
versy, which had been suppressed at the height of the conflict.
But the public had not lost their taste for vituperative literature,
and Nashe, foreseeing opportunities for 'copy' had advertised
himself in Pierce Penilesse as a professional controversialist. In
this capacity, he undoubtedly aspired to imitate Pietro Aretino,
who held all Italy at bay from his one refuge in Venice (1527—57).
Nashe, in order to be sure of rousing an antagonist, followed his
challenge by a personal attack on the two Harveys', who had already
crossed swords with him, and a 'flyting' at once began. In studying
this controversy, it must be remembered that literary duels,
quite apart from personal animosity, had been a quasi-academic
tradition since the days of the medieval Serventois and Jeu-partis.
Dunbar, Kennedy, Montgomerie, Churchyard, Skelton, Alexander
Barclay, Lily the grammarian, James V, David Lyndsay and
Stewart had taken part in ‘flytings? ' But both Nashe and Harvey
were probably more influenced by the classical scholars of the
renascence. Beside Aretino, Poggio had given models of vitu-
perative skill against Felix Anti-papa, Filelfo Vallas and Petrarch.
Julius Caesar Scaliger and Étienne Dolet* had both attacked
Erasmus with the vilest scurrility; and, lastly, Cicero, Harvey's
supreme authority, had proved a past master in the art of invective
against the living and had not spared the dead. Personal resent-
ment was certainly a motive in the Harvey-Nashe controversy;
but private animosity was merged in the class hatred which
the university nourished against the literary adventurers of
London.
Nashe's Apologie of Pierce Pennylesse marks a new stage in
the art of personal abuse. Martin Marprelate had written in the
style of a boisterous monologue, in which his arguments were
enlivened by parentheses, ejaculations and puns. Nashe, un-
doubtedly his imitator, cultivates the same torrential and eccentric
eloquence, but hardly attempts to refute his adversary. He merely
uses him as a canvas on which to display his brilliant ingenuity.
He invents amazing terms of vituperation, whose force is to be
found in their imagery rather than imputation. Harvey is a
a
1 See ante, vol, in, pp. 395, 545.
2 T. Schipper : W. Dunbar, Berlin, 1884. R. Brotanek : Alex. Montgomerie, Vienna
and Leipzig, 1896.
3 Voigt: Die Wiederlebung des classischen Alterthums. Körting: Gesch. der
Literatur Italiens im Zeitalter der Renaissance, 1, p. 388.
+ R. C. Christie : Étienne Dolet, 2nd ed. , 1899.
3 Ante, vol. 11, chap. XVII, pp. 383–5.
:
## p. 323 (#345) ############################################
Christs. Teares over Jerusalem 323
mud-born bubble,' a 'bladder of pride newe blowne,' a 'cotquean
and scrattop of scoldes,' a 'lumpish leaden-heeld letter-dauber,'
a mote-catching carper. ' Sometimes, his antagonist becomes the
occasion for notes and observations in which the original subject
is lost sight of, as in his digression on Roman satire, or on the
adaptability of the hexameter to English. Such exuberant fertility
of fancy and expression was primarily Nashe's innate gift. But
his unceasing efforts at paronomasia betray the influence of such
Italian Latinists as Guarino, and his affectation of figurative para-
phrase is, in its essence, of the kind which the Theophrastians
made fashionable a few years later. But there are other passages
in which his imaginative sarcasm overreaches itself and collapses
in mere buffoonery.
Harvey retaliated with Pierces Supererogation. But the
reply remained unanswered, since Nashe now came forward as
a religious reformer in Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), to.
which he prefixed a declaration of peace and goodwill to all men.
Such sudden conversions were not uncommon in an age of conflict
between the traditions of medieval Christianity and the Graeco-
Oriental morality advocated by the classics of the silver age.
Gosson and Rankins both wrote plays before condemning the
immorality of the stage; Anthony Munday is alleged to have
written A Ballad against Plays; John Marston followed the
production of an erotic poem with an attack on licentious verse;
R. Brathwaite, after playing with the toys of fancy, published The
Prodigals Teares: or His fare-well to Vanity (1614); and both
Dekker and Rowlands unexpectedly appear in the guise of mission-
aries. As we have seen in the case of Greene, the ideals of ancient
Rome and of renascent Italy were a treacherous guide among the
temptations of London, and but a sorry consolation in times of
poverty and pestilence. But the taste of the reading public must
have chiefly weighed with these bread-winners. The lower classes
loved the spectacle of a stricken conscience, even in their street
ballads, and the ever-increasing sect of puritans must, by now,
have formed a body of opinion difficult to resist. The booklet
begins with a long paraphrase of Christ's prophecy of the fall of
Jerusalem. Then follows an account of its fulfilment, drawn from
Joseph Ben Gorion'. But it is easy to see that the narrative is
coloured by a national sense of uneasiness. The signs and tokens
· History of the Latter Times of the Jews' Commonweal. Vide McKerrow, Works of
T. Nashe, vol. iv, 1908, p. 212.
21-2
## p. 324 (#346) ############################################
324 London and Popular Literature
which foreshadowed the destruction of the holy city are like the
broadside prodigies? which were circulating throughout England,
and the horrors of the siege recalled the downfall of Antwerp,
still fresh in men's minds? . Nashe pointed to the ruin of
Jerusalem as an object-lesson for London, whose sins, he cried,
were no less ripe for judgment. Thus he introduces an arraign-
ment of city life.
The transformation of society from an aristocracy based on the
subjection of the masses to a monarchy based on the balance
of classes was being accompanied by the development of commerce
and the diffusion of knowledge.
The age offered many more prizes
to win, and life in London became a struggle for self-advancement.
Such a period of transition inevitably bred abuses. Men and
women did not scruple about the means they employed to push
their fortunes. The successful spared no ostentation which might
command the respect of their fellows, while the unsuccessful were
filled with envy and discontent. Immorality increased in imita-
tion of Italy, or as a reaction from the restraints of the medieval
church. Finally, in this expansion of the intellectual and social
world, many found the faith of their ancestors insufficient, and
turned to atheism. Such was the society which Nashe denounced
.
in the last part of Christs Teares. The style is still vigorous, but
it has lost its exuberant originality and, in places, approximates to
pulpit oratory. There are a few touches of Nashe's irresistible
satire and an exposure of London stews unparalleled in English
literature. But his attitude is that of a Tudor churchman. Like
Latimer, he anathematises pride as the fundamental vice of the
strenuous, ambitious city life. Like Crowley, he designates all the
necessary and accidental abuses of competition as a violation of
the Biblical law to love one another. But what the booklet loses
in spirit, it gains in thoughtfulness. It is largely an attempt to
examine the social sentiments. Avarice, extortion, vainglory,
atheism, discontent, contention, disdain, love of 'gorgeous attyre,'
delicacy (worldliness), lust or luxury and sloth are all anatomised
and all traced back to pride. In this method of analysis and
synthesis, Nashe evolves a literary process hardly removed from
1 Ante, vol. 111, chap. v, p. 111 and bibl. , p. 494.
2 Cf. The Spoyle of Antwerpe, Faithfully reported by a true Englishman (ie.
G. Gascoigne), Novem. 1576, London, 1577 (? ). The Tragicall Historie of the citie
of Antwerpe since the departure of King Phillip, 1586. A Looking Glasse for London
and England (by R. Greene and T. Lodge), 1594. A Larum for London or the siedge
of Antwerpe, 1602. Dekker's (? ) Canaan's Calamitie, 1598.
## p. 325 (#347) ############################################
Terrors of the Night 325
the essay. Each sin forms a theme of its own, introduced by
a definition. Thus,
vaine glory is any excessive pride or delight which we take in things unneces-
sary; much of the nature is it of ambition but it is not so dangerous or
conversant about so great matters as ambition. It is (as I may call it) the
froth and seething up of ambition.
This play of thought and fancy on familiar ideas, already notice-
able in The Anatomie of Absurditie, illustrates a habit of mind
made familiar to us by Bacon and his school.
But Nashe was not destined to create the essay. He had,
indeed, the sympathy with daily life, the knowledge of character,
and the familiarity with classical wisdom necessary to cultivate
this genre. But he had also to earn his bread and pay his debts.
He could not distil his philosophy into a volume of detached
counsels and reflections, which might slowly win its way. So
he continued to squander his wit, learning and experience in
pamphlets 'botched up and compyled' on the sensations of the
moment.
Thus, in his next production, reflections on Turkey, Iceland,
physiognomy, consumption and Camden hurtle one another in a
counterblast to dream-superstitions. Europe, at this moment,
was agitated with the belief that the devil was regaining his
control over man. His handiwork was being discovered every-
where; old women were witches, cats were spirits or transfigured
men, dreams were messages from hell. The report of a gentleman,
who died after experiencing seven fantastic visions, had just re-
awakened Englishmen's alarm at the unseen perils of sleep and
darkness. Nashe seized this opportunity to compose the Terrors
of the Night. At this time, demonology belonged to the realms
of theological disquisition. Even R. Scot had not escaped the
academic atmosphere, and G. Gifford" and H. Holland” had
recently delivered themselves of treatises unutterably scholastic.
It is a striking illustration of the vitality of popular literature
that Nashe discovered how to burst the bubble of these super-
stitions by sound common sense and sympathetic insight into
human nature. He claims that one thought of faith will put
to flight all the powers of evil, and answers with a volley of
ridicule the dogma of St Chrysostom that the devil can multiply
himself indefinitely. He quotes history to prove that dreams
seldom or never come true unless they are direct intimations from
1 Discourse of the subtile Practises of Devilles, 1587.
? A Treatise against Witchcraft, 1590.
## p. 326 (#348) ############################################
326 London and Popular Literature
6
a
6
God; and he refutes the belief in astrologers from his own experi-
ence of their careers. Most of them, he declares, began as
apothecaries' apprentices and dogleeches, who used to impose on
rustics with ointments and syrups made of toasted cheese and
candle ends. By and bye, some needy gallant hears of their
practices and introduces them to a nobleman on condition of
sharing the profits. Thus, they make their way through the
world, sometimes rising by their counterfeit art to the position of
privy councillor. He disposes of the mystery of dreams, explain-
ing them as after-effects of the day's activity ; 'echoes of our con-
ceipts,' often coloured by sensations felt in sleep, so that the sound
of a dog's bark suggests the 'complaint of damned ghosts' in hell,
and he that is spiced wyth the gowte or the dropsie' dreams of
fetters and manacles. This theory had already been outlined by
Scot', but Nashe surpasses the older controversialist when he
describes the moral terrors of the night. Not only does a guilty
conscience breed 'superstitions as good as an hundred furies, but
the sorrows and anxieties of life have special power, as Bullein
had pointed out? , in the loneliness and gloom of sleep-time.
But Nashe was never again to approach so near the high level
of a moralist. Some more skirmishing took place between him
and Gabriel Harvey in the autumn of 1593 and in 1594%. And
then, in 1596, he produced Have with you to Saffron-Walden, or,
Gabriell Harveys Hunt is up.
This piece of invective is unique in English literature, and it
exhausts the literary resources of the age. To multiply his
ridicule and give scope to his digressions, he borrowed from
comedy and cast the lampoon into the form of a tetralogue, in
which four speakers contribute to criticise Harvey's style and to
make merry over his humble origin. Then ensues a burlesque
biography of the doctor. His conception and birth are narrated
in the manner of Rabelais, and his academic character is travestied
on the model of Pedantius * Nashe creates a truly infernal
picture of the university scholar, absorbed in his own spite:
In the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the ragingest furie of
the last plague, when there dyde above 1600 a week in London, ink-squitter-
ing and printing against me at Wolfes in Powles churchyard.
1 Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, Bk. x.
? Bulwarke of Defence : Booke of Compoundes, fol. liiij.
3 Ante, vol. in, ch. XVII, bibl. , p. 546.
* See ed. Moore Smith (Louvain, 1905) and post, vol. v, the chapter on Academic
Plays.
## p. 327 (#349) ############################################
Lenten Stuffe
327
Neither Nashe nor anyone else expected such accusations to
be taken seriously. But the tract deserves a place in permanent
literature. It is a saturnalia of invective such as only the age
could produce. Nor must we regard this intellect and ingenuity
as altogether wasted in a barren attempt to defame a fellow-
creature. The impeachment was composed for a critical audience,
and, in the effort to attain rhetorical effect, the art of expression
was perceptibly enlarged. Among other features, there is a full-
length portrait of Harvey, executed with a thoroughness of detail
which Mme de Scudéry might have envied, and the character of
an intelligencer which the Overbury collection never surpassed.
Nashe passed through two years of adversity, and then
reappeared in 1599 with Lenten Stuffe. This pamphlet is an
ambitious attempt to 'wring juice out of a flint’: to heighten his
humour by extracting it from unproductive material, and he
succeeds in uniting many of the lighter types of prose literature
in a single pamphlet. He begins by introducing a personal note
telling the public of his literary difficulties and financial em-
barrassments. These led him to leave London. In return for the
hospitality which he enjoyed at Yarmouth, he recounts the history
of that town (drawn from Camden) in a fine spirit of pageantry,
trumpeting its origin and development 'as I have scrapped out of
worm-eaten Parchments. He then treats his readers to a speci-
men of burlesque encomium, such as the Romans, Italians and
especially the German anti-Grobianists, had made popular",
working up an eulogy on the herring fisheries, not forgetting
their services to Lent (hence the title). The Prayse of the
Red Herring soon develops into a kind of jest-book. But the
tales and anecdotes no longer turn on the humiliation of
monks or the 'quicke answers' of wenches? . Nashe wittily
parodies the legends of antiquity and adapts them to the
glorification of this homely fish. How the fable of Midas, who
turned everything to gold, originated from the fact that he
ate a red herring. How Leander and Hero (after a burlesque
account of their adventures, in Nashe's best manner) were con-
verted into fish-the youth to a ling, the maiden to a Cadwallader
herring and the old nurse, who had a sharp temper, into the
mustard which always accompanies them at table. The curing of
the herring was discovered in a manner suggestive of Charles
1 Vide C. H. Herford, The Literary Relations of England and Germany, chap. VII,
pp. 381--3. Also bibl. under Burlesque Encomia.
* Cf. A C. Mery Talys, Merie Tales of Master Skelton, The Geystes of Skoggan.
## p. 328 (#350) ############################################
328 London and Popular Literature
6
Lamb's roast pig, and the first red herring was sold to the pope
by methods reminiscent of the sibyl's sale of the prophetic books.
But, besides a sense of the romance of history, and an ingenious
appropriation of classical lore, there is an unmistakable love for
the sea and sympathy with the rough, simple life of seamen.
In one place, he tells how 'boystrous woolpacks of ridged tides
came rowling in. ? Again, he describes the cobbles which skim
'flightswift thorow the glassy fieldes of Thetis as if it were the land
of yce, and sliding over the boiling desert so earely and never
bruise one bubble of it. ' And he talks of these frostbitten crab-
tree faced lads, spunne out of the hards of the towe. '
Yet, Lenten Stuffe never enjoyed the popularity of Pierce
Penilesse. With all its cleverness and narrative power, the tract
did not gratify the Londoner's interest in city life. This taste for
realistic satire and humour continually increased and tended every
year to number more educated men within its ranks. At the same
time, court circles began to grow weary of Euphuism, and to prefer
discussing their fellow-creatures rather than indulging in the
apostrophes and soliloquies of prose romances' or such poems as
Ovid's Elegies? and Venus and Adonis. These two elements com-
bined to form an upper stratum in the general reading public.
'Select' persons lived in the same city as ordinary members of the
middle classes, and were attracted by the same phenomena. But
they were more fastidiously critical, and they looked more uncom-
promisingly for the stamp of classicism in any publication of which
they were to approves. Even Sir John Harington's Rabelaisian
descents into the secrets of cloacinean burlesque (1596) are illu-
minated with bookish allusions and classical quotations. The school
of pamphleteers who had formerly secured patronage with erotic
poetry now followed, perforce, the new tendency. Thomas Lodge set
the example, in 1595, by producing a slim volume of verse eclogues
and satires, and, with a show of self-assertion made fashionable by
Nashe, he entitled the venture A Fig for Momus.
Verse satire had flourished throughout the sixteenth century,
and, in many instances, developed individual portraiture under
the guise of types. Within the last fifty years, Crowley's One and
Thirty Epigrams (1550), Bansley's Pryde and Abuse of Women
6
* Ante, vol. II, ch. XVI.
3 Marlowe.
3 Note the condescension of Peacham : Compleat Gentleman, . There is no book 80
bad, even Sir Bevis himselfe, Owleglasse, or Nashe's herring, but some commodity may
be got out of it. '
4 See bibl. under Miscellaneous Burlesques.
## p. 329 (#351) ############################################
box
FI
PX
de
PP
Rise of Formal Satire 329
(1550), Hake’s Newes out of Poules Churcheyarde (1567) and
Gosson's Quippes for Upstart Gentlewomen (1596) had covered the
most prominent abuses of the time and kept pace with the growing
spirit of puritan censoriousness. But Lodge ignored their example
and revived the new genre which Wyatt' had introduced, almost
unobserved, into English literature: the avowed imitation and
occasional paraphrase of classical models. He chose Horace for
his satirical prototype; but, attempting to copy the Roman's genial
discursiveness, he merely gave the public ten dull, ill-constructed
satires and epistles, mingled with a few Vergilian eclogues. And
yet A Fig for Momus is important. Wyatt was before his time
and, moreover, confined his animadversions to the court, in a
difficult metre borrowed from the Italian. Lodge's production is
as miscellaneous and bookish as a volume of essays. Moreover, he
made current the use of pseudonymous allusion, and, while
Gascoigne had rather unsuccessfully experimented in blank verse,
he demonstrated that classical satire could be most effectively
written in the decasyllabic couplet.
In 1597, Joseph Hall, then a young fellow of Emmanuel college,
claimed the honour of being the first English satirist with
Virgidemiarum. It is possible that Hall's satires existed in
manuscript as early as 1591, and, again, it is just conceivable that
he was unacquainted with the work of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Donne
and Lodges. But, in any case, the boast of originality was partly
justified, inasmuch as Hall discovered Juvenal as the true model
for Elizabethan and Jacobean satire. In the hands of Horace, the
Roman Satura was little more than a series of desultory conver-
sations, dominated by an unembittered scepticism of human
activities. Juvenal, however, was a rhetorician, who devoted a life's
training in oratory to the task of making out a case against society.
As such, his satires have all the uncompromising sweep of an
indictment and are enforced with every artifice of arrangement
and expression. Both his systematic thoroughness and his aggres-
sive indignation, though largely a pose, were adapted to this
contentious age, and Hall may fairly claim to be the first who
reproduced his method and spirit in English verse“.
72
inte
A
1 Ante, vol. 11, chap. vi. For popular satirists, see ibid. chap. v.
? Sat. v, however, is an imitation of Juvenal x, and a forerunner of The Vanity
of Human Wishes.
3 Vide A. B. Grosart, Occasional Issues, vol. 1x, 1879; Bp. Hall's Complete Poems,
intro. , pp. vi-viii.
* Vide A. B. Grosart, ibid. pp. viii-xiv, for list of parallel passages between Hall
and Horace, Juvenal and Persius.
## p. 330 (#352) ############################################
330
London and Popular Literature
But this originality of imitation did not fetter a very living
interest in the questions of his own day. This was an age when all
educated men discussed literary criticism', and Hall devotes the
first book of his satires to these debatable topics. He merely
champions the poetic reaction of the nineties,' when he censures
the insipidity of love poetry, declaring that Cupid has now made
himself a place among the muses, who begin to tolerate stories of
the stews. ' Academic circles, however, must already have been
preparing the way for the Augustan age, when Hall ridicules such
poets as Spenser for compiling 'worm-eaten stories of old time,'
full of invocations and strange enchantments, and when, in a
graphic description of a play-house, he represents ‘Turkish Tam-
berlaine' stalking across the stage, declaiming verses of half
Italianised English, and followed by a 'selfe misformed lout,' who
mimics his gestures, disgraces the tragic muse and sets all his
spectators in a roar? . The second and third books deal with more
general abuses. But the commonplaces of satire gain new force
and directness from the spirit of cultured irony with which Hall
invests them. The time-honoured accusation against the fee-
serving physician3 reappears in the form of a sarcastic com-
mendation". The impostures of astrology are ridiculed by a
maliciously absurd calculation on the issue of a love affairs. We
have the inevitable satire on the gallant, but the form is new.
Ruffio is seen disporting himself in 'Pawles,' “picking his glutted
teeth since late noontide. Yet, on closer inspection, we find that
his face is pinched and his eye sunken, and we realise that the
youth is starving himself to buy clothing, the fantastic embellish-
ments of which give him the appearance of a scarecrow. And
Hall's most perfect piece of workmanship is a mock advertisement
in which a “gentle squire' looks for a “trencher-chaplaine,' and, in
return for abject servility and unremitting toil, offers him 'five
markes and winter liverie? ! '
The first three books of Virgidemiarum are termed 'tooth-
less satires,' because they aim at institutions, customs or con-
ventionalities. The last three are styled 'byting,' since they
attack individuals under pseudonyms which were probably no
a
i Ante, vol. II, bibl. to ch.
3 Ante, vol. III, chap. XIX.
4 Barnabe Rich catches the spirit of the times when he talks of this quicke sprited
age, when so many excellent wittes are endeavouring by their pennes to set upp lightes,
and to give the world new eyes to see into deformitie. ' The Honestie of this Age, 1614.
5 For the prose fiction of Lodge, Greene and Nashe, see vol. II of the present
work, chap. xvi; for their plays, see vol. v.
## p. 318 (#340) ############################################
318
London and Popular Literature
pecuniary embarrassments of young men, for gradually involving
the spendthrift in debt and then using him as a decoy to enmesh
others, were a theme of deadly interest to a large number of
Londoners and offered endless opportunity for wit and narrative
power. Although usurers had been an object of satire for more
than a century, Lodge was the first systematically to expose
their practices. But he still, in a style designed to appeal to the
educated, relies for literary effect on the insincerities of the
euphuistic novel, and presents a narrative full of apostrophes,
harangues and reflections.
One of the next efforts was an examination of the age by
Thomas Nashe, in The Anatomie of Absurditie (1588). The work
is a prolix and erratic satire, coloured by touches of euphuism
and confused by innumerable digressions. But, amongst an arraign-
ment of feminine character, in the manner of The Schole-howse of
Women, a defence of fabulists, an interpretation of Ovid's Meta-
morphoses, a discussion on diet, an invective against ballad-mongers
and the customary defence of poetry, the writer vigorously criticises
classical pedantry as one of the great errors of the age; while his
thoughts on study and conduct, with the assertion that the fruits
of our private studie ought to appeare in our publique behaviour,'
and the warning to think not common things unworthy of thy
knowledge,' foreshadow a literature of counsel and reflection which
Bacon was to realise. But, for the moment, London was agitated
by controversy, and the public looked for satire and invective only.
So Nashe turned to the ruder and more profitable trade of
lampoonist.
Four years later, Robert Greene changed the current of prose
literature, discarding all the canons of euphuism by which he
himself had made his reputation. But even Greene did not at
once discover the want of his age. He began by appealing to the
old English love of felonious ingenuity and humorous knavery in
the coney-catching pamphlets already described? . He gives but
few facts of thief life, and these are mostly drawn from the second
part of Awdeley's Fraternitye and Parker's Manifest Detection
of Dice-Play? The bulk of his work is taken up with 'pithy and
pleasant’tales, which lack the picturesque touches and sociological
interest of Harman's great work. But, at the same time, his
pamphlets are most significant. To begin with, he is no longer
writing of the organised vagrants who infested the country, but of
the versatile London thief, a modern type, whose existence was
1 Ante, vol. II, chap. XVI, pp. 360-2.
* Ibid. chap. v, pp. 98 and 102.
## p. 319 (#341) ############################################
Greene's Social Pamphlets 319
bound up with the development of the capital. And, again, though
this realistic interest in city life has compelled even a successful
euphuist to denude his diction of all ornamentation, yet the frame-
work of his pamphlets shows the skill of the professional author.
His methods of presentation are well illustrated by The Defence
of Conny-catching. The pamphlet claims to be a plea for the dis-
reputable thief, and contends that worse cozenage was to be
found among the respectable classes! Yet this argument merely
served as a pretext for exposing the dishonesty of usurers, millers,
butchers, lawyers and tailors, and, still more, as an excuse for
presenting the public with some admirable tales. Apparently,
the success of these rather superficial pamphlets led him to widen
his scope, and to include the practices of female criminals. This
new material afforded an opening for novelty of form. Greene,
always in search of variety, revived the medieval dialogue, presented
the public with A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a
Shee Conny-catcher, in which the interlocutors discuss the compara-
tive merits of male and female with a view to theft and blackmail.
Though a burlesque debate, this tract really penetrates deeply into
the sociology of crime, by considering the questions of sex and
character which underlie the superficial dexterity of coney-catching.
This series of pamphlets marks Greene's apprenticeship in
social literature. Having exhausted his material, he produced,
in July 1592, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, in which he
reaches his consummation. It has already been shown? how the
greater part of the tract is taken up with a dispute between the
courtier and the tradesman; and how the jury of tradesmen
brought in to decide the case enables Greene to pass in review
representatives of differing trades and pursuits.
The value of the pamphlet consists in the new life and meaning
that Greene puts into old forms of thought. Tradesmen had been
victims of caricature since the early Middle Ages:. The attack
on the fashionable spendthrift, the central figure of A Quip, is
part of the immemorial feud between men of wealth and men of
1 The idea was quite in keeping with the spirit of the sixteenth century: see below,
Nashe's Lenten Stufe, and bibl. under Burlesque Encomia. Parson Hyberdine had
delivered a sermon in praise of thievery. Many broadside ballads sang the joys of
vagabondage. The Defence of Conny-catching claims to be a counterblast to Greene's
preceding pamphlets, Notable Discovery and the later parts of Conny-catching.
But those booklets are gratuitously commended by their self-constituted antagonist,
and our author is addressed with a respectful suavity, quite out of keeping with the
sixteenth century spirit of controversy, but quite in keeping with Greene's methods of
self-advertisement.
? Ante, vol. 111, chap. xvi, p. 361.
3 Ibid. chap. v, p. 84.
## p. 320 (#342) ############################################
320 London and Popular Literature
learning, and had already found expression with Sir Thomas More
and Roger Ascham. The idea of reviewing the representatives
of each trade and profession had been used again and again by
pamphleteers since The Ship of Fools, to go no further back!
Yet the pamphlet marks a fresh stage in the development of
popular literature. The types of society are brought into im-
mediate contact with the social controversy which culminated in
the civil war. Moreover, their portraiture is new. Character
sketches arise as soon as a writer has a point of view from which
to contemplate a class or a type. In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the
aim of the descriptions is sociological ; in Higden and, later, with
Andrew Boorde', the trend is ethnological and political. Awdeley
and Harman use the character sketch to distinguish the different
departments in the art of roguery, which at first sight appears
homogeneous. But very few writers before Greene had embodied
the moral or humorous aspect of a class in the individuality or
mannerisms of its representatives. If we take the knight, the tailor,
or the usurer, we recognise them at once as living personalities.
And what draws or repels us is the man's occupation, or, rather,
Greene's conception of his occupation. Henceforth, Londoners
were to look for the glory or shame of their society in the descrip-
tion of familiar figures which thronged the street or St Paul's.
But Greene's most profound commentary on his age is the
Groatsworth of Wit. The outline of the story is probably
reminiscent of readings in Terence, and the main idea may well
have been suggested by the Dutch Latin comedies of the Prodigal
Son. But autobiographical touches are unmistakable. We see
there the evil effects of a boyhood spent in an unsympathetic home,
hopelessly out of touch with the new movements of the time. Such
an environment was not likely to prepare a sensitive, impulsive youth
for the dissipations of the university or the storm and stress of
Elizabethan London. Greene represented a fairly numerous class
of men whom an undiscriminating study of Latin and Italian poetry
led to the hiding of debauchery under an appearance of art and
culture. The spectacle of the perfidious Lamilia, composing love
ditties and accepting courtship couched in Ovidian and Terentian
pp. 482–4.
? Ante, vol. III, chap. v, bibl. ,
? De Proprietatibus Rerum (first printed c. 1470).
3 Polychronicon, ptd by Caxton, 1482.
The fyrst boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, pub. 1547.
5 For this influence on Greene's repentance-novels, see J. D. Wilson's article in
The Library, Oct. 1909.
6 De Arte Amandi.
## p. 321 (#343) ############################################
The Seven Deadly Sins
321
preciousness, is an unconscious allegory on the fundamental im-
perfection of the renascence.
Greene had discovered the way to satisfy London's interest in
itself. His mantle fell on Nashe, who, at the termination of the
Marprelate controversy, was driven to look for other means of
subsistence. He returned to the review of society with a keener
and wider perception of life, a satirical vein not uncoloured by
Juvenal and Rabelais and the mastery of an exuberant and
torrential style, in which argot blends with Latinisms. Like
Greene, he cast about for an attractive setting. The devil was
still an object of ribald curiosity, so Nashe associated his satire
with that suggestive personality, and, in Pierce Penilesse, his
Supplication to the Divell, he represents the literary man as a
proverbial lackpenny addressing a complaint to the devil, since
appeals to the church are useless. But, though the supplication
contains contemporary portraiture of life and character', yet
old forms of thought were too deeply ingrained in popular senti-
ment to be eluded. Nashe reverted to the conception of the
seven deadly sins. During the storm of the reformation, the ‘sins'
were banished from literature, but they reappear, towards the end
of the century, as a comic interlude in Marlowe's Faustus, and as
a vehicle for political invective and elaborate imagery in Spenser's
Faerie Queene? Nashe presents all the humours of the age and
his own disillusionments and aspirations under these ‘sins. ' In
this expansive age, when love of travel blended with national
self-consciousness, Londoners took a critical interest in foreign
types. So Nashe vividly portrays the pride peculiar to the
Spaniard, the Italian and the Frenchman. Dutchmen, unwelcome
in England because of their commercial competition, are over-
whelmed with invectives. In due course, the writer passes on
to Gluttony, and then to Drunkenness, in which the Dutch are
again satirised. "The nurse of all this enormitie (as of all evills)
is Idleness,' the type of which is the stationer who referred all
would-be customers to his shop-boy with a jerk of his thumb,
but was full of activity at meal-time. Covetousness is not treated;
but the supplication is followed by a disquisition on devilry and
spiritualism, at that moment one of the burning questions of
the day.
But this brilliant and felicitous commentary on contemporary
London was by no means uninfected by the contentious spirit of
· Ante, vol. II, p. 362. ? F. Rogers, The Seven Deadly Sins, 1907, chap. VI.
3 See bibl. under Witch-controversy.
E. L. IV. CH. XVI.
21
## p. 322 (#344) ############################################
322 London and Popular Literature
the age. The city was still echoing with the Marprelate contro-
versy, which had been suppressed at the height of the conflict.
But the public had not lost their taste for vituperative literature,
and Nashe, foreseeing opportunities for 'copy' had advertised
himself in Pierce Penilesse as a professional controversialist. In
this capacity, he undoubtedly aspired to imitate Pietro Aretino,
who held all Italy at bay from his one refuge in Venice (1527—57).
Nashe, in order to be sure of rousing an antagonist, followed his
challenge by a personal attack on the two Harveys', who had already
crossed swords with him, and a 'flyting' at once began. In studying
this controversy, it must be remembered that literary duels,
quite apart from personal animosity, had been a quasi-academic
tradition since the days of the medieval Serventois and Jeu-partis.
Dunbar, Kennedy, Montgomerie, Churchyard, Skelton, Alexander
Barclay, Lily the grammarian, James V, David Lyndsay and
Stewart had taken part in ‘flytings? ' But both Nashe and Harvey
were probably more influenced by the classical scholars of the
renascence. Beside Aretino, Poggio had given models of vitu-
perative skill against Felix Anti-papa, Filelfo Vallas and Petrarch.
Julius Caesar Scaliger and Étienne Dolet* had both attacked
Erasmus with the vilest scurrility; and, lastly, Cicero, Harvey's
supreme authority, had proved a past master in the art of invective
against the living and had not spared the dead. Personal resent-
ment was certainly a motive in the Harvey-Nashe controversy;
but private animosity was merged in the class hatred which
the university nourished against the literary adventurers of
London.
Nashe's Apologie of Pierce Pennylesse marks a new stage in
the art of personal abuse. Martin Marprelate had written in the
style of a boisterous monologue, in which his arguments were
enlivened by parentheses, ejaculations and puns. Nashe, un-
doubtedly his imitator, cultivates the same torrential and eccentric
eloquence, but hardly attempts to refute his adversary. He merely
uses him as a canvas on which to display his brilliant ingenuity.
He invents amazing terms of vituperation, whose force is to be
found in their imagery rather than imputation. Harvey is a
a
1 See ante, vol, in, pp. 395, 545.
2 T. Schipper : W. Dunbar, Berlin, 1884. R. Brotanek : Alex. Montgomerie, Vienna
and Leipzig, 1896.
3 Voigt: Die Wiederlebung des classischen Alterthums. Körting: Gesch. der
Literatur Italiens im Zeitalter der Renaissance, 1, p. 388.
+ R. C. Christie : Étienne Dolet, 2nd ed. , 1899.
3 Ante, vol. 11, chap. XVII, pp. 383–5.
:
## p. 323 (#345) ############################################
Christs. Teares over Jerusalem 323
mud-born bubble,' a 'bladder of pride newe blowne,' a 'cotquean
and scrattop of scoldes,' a 'lumpish leaden-heeld letter-dauber,'
a mote-catching carper. ' Sometimes, his antagonist becomes the
occasion for notes and observations in which the original subject
is lost sight of, as in his digression on Roman satire, or on the
adaptability of the hexameter to English. Such exuberant fertility
of fancy and expression was primarily Nashe's innate gift. But
his unceasing efforts at paronomasia betray the influence of such
Italian Latinists as Guarino, and his affectation of figurative para-
phrase is, in its essence, of the kind which the Theophrastians
made fashionable a few years later. But there are other passages
in which his imaginative sarcasm overreaches itself and collapses
in mere buffoonery.
Harvey retaliated with Pierces Supererogation. But the
reply remained unanswered, since Nashe now came forward as
a religious reformer in Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), to.
which he prefixed a declaration of peace and goodwill to all men.
Such sudden conversions were not uncommon in an age of conflict
between the traditions of medieval Christianity and the Graeco-
Oriental morality advocated by the classics of the silver age.
Gosson and Rankins both wrote plays before condemning the
immorality of the stage; Anthony Munday is alleged to have
written A Ballad against Plays; John Marston followed the
production of an erotic poem with an attack on licentious verse;
R. Brathwaite, after playing with the toys of fancy, published The
Prodigals Teares: or His fare-well to Vanity (1614); and both
Dekker and Rowlands unexpectedly appear in the guise of mission-
aries. As we have seen in the case of Greene, the ideals of ancient
Rome and of renascent Italy were a treacherous guide among the
temptations of London, and but a sorry consolation in times of
poverty and pestilence. But the taste of the reading public must
have chiefly weighed with these bread-winners. The lower classes
loved the spectacle of a stricken conscience, even in their street
ballads, and the ever-increasing sect of puritans must, by now,
have formed a body of opinion difficult to resist. The booklet
begins with a long paraphrase of Christ's prophecy of the fall of
Jerusalem. Then follows an account of its fulfilment, drawn from
Joseph Ben Gorion'. But it is easy to see that the narrative is
coloured by a national sense of uneasiness. The signs and tokens
· History of the Latter Times of the Jews' Commonweal. Vide McKerrow, Works of
T. Nashe, vol. iv, 1908, p. 212.
21-2
## p. 324 (#346) ############################################
324 London and Popular Literature
which foreshadowed the destruction of the holy city are like the
broadside prodigies? which were circulating throughout England,
and the horrors of the siege recalled the downfall of Antwerp,
still fresh in men's minds? . Nashe pointed to the ruin of
Jerusalem as an object-lesson for London, whose sins, he cried,
were no less ripe for judgment. Thus he introduces an arraign-
ment of city life.
The transformation of society from an aristocracy based on the
subjection of the masses to a monarchy based on the balance
of classes was being accompanied by the development of commerce
and the diffusion of knowledge.
The age offered many more prizes
to win, and life in London became a struggle for self-advancement.
Such a period of transition inevitably bred abuses. Men and
women did not scruple about the means they employed to push
their fortunes. The successful spared no ostentation which might
command the respect of their fellows, while the unsuccessful were
filled with envy and discontent. Immorality increased in imita-
tion of Italy, or as a reaction from the restraints of the medieval
church. Finally, in this expansion of the intellectual and social
world, many found the faith of their ancestors insufficient, and
turned to atheism. Such was the society which Nashe denounced
.
in the last part of Christs Teares. The style is still vigorous, but
it has lost its exuberant originality and, in places, approximates to
pulpit oratory. There are a few touches of Nashe's irresistible
satire and an exposure of London stews unparalleled in English
literature. But his attitude is that of a Tudor churchman. Like
Latimer, he anathematises pride as the fundamental vice of the
strenuous, ambitious city life. Like Crowley, he designates all the
necessary and accidental abuses of competition as a violation of
the Biblical law to love one another. But what the booklet loses
in spirit, it gains in thoughtfulness. It is largely an attempt to
examine the social sentiments. Avarice, extortion, vainglory,
atheism, discontent, contention, disdain, love of 'gorgeous attyre,'
delicacy (worldliness), lust or luxury and sloth are all anatomised
and all traced back to pride. In this method of analysis and
synthesis, Nashe evolves a literary process hardly removed from
1 Ante, vol. 111, chap. v, p. 111 and bibl. , p. 494.
2 Cf. The Spoyle of Antwerpe, Faithfully reported by a true Englishman (ie.
G. Gascoigne), Novem. 1576, London, 1577 (? ). The Tragicall Historie of the citie
of Antwerpe since the departure of King Phillip, 1586. A Looking Glasse for London
and England (by R. Greene and T. Lodge), 1594. A Larum for London or the siedge
of Antwerpe, 1602. Dekker's (? ) Canaan's Calamitie, 1598.
## p. 325 (#347) ############################################
Terrors of the Night 325
the essay. Each sin forms a theme of its own, introduced by
a definition. Thus,
vaine glory is any excessive pride or delight which we take in things unneces-
sary; much of the nature is it of ambition but it is not so dangerous or
conversant about so great matters as ambition. It is (as I may call it) the
froth and seething up of ambition.
This play of thought and fancy on familiar ideas, already notice-
able in The Anatomie of Absurditie, illustrates a habit of mind
made familiar to us by Bacon and his school.
But Nashe was not destined to create the essay. He had,
indeed, the sympathy with daily life, the knowledge of character,
and the familiarity with classical wisdom necessary to cultivate
this genre. But he had also to earn his bread and pay his debts.
He could not distil his philosophy into a volume of detached
counsels and reflections, which might slowly win its way. So
he continued to squander his wit, learning and experience in
pamphlets 'botched up and compyled' on the sensations of the
moment.
Thus, in his next production, reflections on Turkey, Iceland,
physiognomy, consumption and Camden hurtle one another in a
counterblast to dream-superstitions. Europe, at this moment,
was agitated with the belief that the devil was regaining his
control over man. His handiwork was being discovered every-
where; old women were witches, cats were spirits or transfigured
men, dreams were messages from hell. The report of a gentleman,
who died after experiencing seven fantastic visions, had just re-
awakened Englishmen's alarm at the unseen perils of sleep and
darkness. Nashe seized this opportunity to compose the Terrors
of the Night. At this time, demonology belonged to the realms
of theological disquisition. Even R. Scot had not escaped the
academic atmosphere, and G. Gifford" and H. Holland” had
recently delivered themselves of treatises unutterably scholastic.
It is a striking illustration of the vitality of popular literature
that Nashe discovered how to burst the bubble of these super-
stitions by sound common sense and sympathetic insight into
human nature. He claims that one thought of faith will put
to flight all the powers of evil, and answers with a volley of
ridicule the dogma of St Chrysostom that the devil can multiply
himself indefinitely. He quotes history to prove that dreams
seldom or never come true unless they are direct intimations from
1 Discourse of the subtile Practises of Devilles, 1587.
? A Treatise against Witchcraft, 1590.
## p. 326 (#348) ############################################
326 London and Popular Literature
6
a
6
God; and he refutes the belief in astrologers from his own experi-
ence of their careers. Most of them, he declares, began as
apothecaries' apprentices and dogleeches, who used to impose on
rustics with ointments and syrups made of toasted cheese and
candle ends. By and bye, some needy gallant hears of their
practices and introduces them to a nobleman on condition of
sharing the profits. Thus, they make their way through the
world, sometimes rising by their counterfeit art to the position of
privy councillor. He disposes of the mystery of dreams, explain-
ing them as after-effects of the day's activity ; 'echoes of our con-
ceipts,' often coloured by sensations felt in sleep, so that the sound
of a dog's bark suggests the 'complaint of damned ghosts' in hell,
and he that is spiced wyth the gowte or the dropsie' dreams of
fetters and manacles. This theory had already been outlined by
Scot', but Nashe surpasses the older controversialist when he
describes the moral terrors of the night. Not only does a guilty
conscience breed 'superstitions as good as an hundred furies, but
the sorrows and anxieties of life have special power, as Bullein
had pointed out? , in the loneliness and gloom of sleep-time.
But Nashe was never again to approach so near the high level
of a moralist. Some more skirmishing took place between him
and Gabriel Harvey in the autumn of 1593 and in 1594%. And
then, in 1596, he produced Have with you to Saffron-Walden, or,
Gabriell Harveys Hunt is up.
This piece of invective is unique in English literature, and it
exhausts the literary resources of the age. To multiply his
ridicule and give scope to his digressions, he borrowed from
comedy and cast the lampoon into the form of a tetralogue, in
which four speakers contribute to criticise Harvey's style and to
make merry over his humble origin. Then ensues a burlesque
biography of the doctor. His conception and birth are narrated
in the manner of Rabelais, and his academic character is travestied
on the model of Pedantius * Nashe creates a truly infernal
picture of the university scholar, absorbed in his own spite:
In the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the ragingest furie of
the last plague, when there dyde above 1600 a week in London, ink-squitter-
ing and printing against me at Wolfes in Powles churchyard.
1 Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, Bk. x.
? Bulwarke of Defence : Booke of Compoundes, fol. liiij.
3 Ante, vol. in, ch. XVII, bibl. , p. 546.
* See ed. Moore Smith (Louvain, 1905) and post, vol. v, the chapter on Academic
Plays.
## p. 327 (#349) ############################################
Lenten Stuffe
327
Neither Nashe nor anyone else expected such accusations to
be taken seriously. But the tract deserves a place in permanent
literature. It is a saturnalia of invective such as only the age
could produce. Nor must we regard this intellect and ingenuity
as altogether wasted in a barren attempt to defame a fellow-
creature. The impeachment was composed for a critical audience,
and, in the effort to attain rhetorical effect, the art of expression
was perceptibly enlarged. Among other features, there is a full-
length portrait of Harvey, executed with a thoroughness of detail
which Mme de Scudéry might have envied, and the character of
an intelligencer which the Overbury collection never surpassed.
Nashe passed through two years of adversity, and then
reappeared in 1599 with Lenten Stuffe. This pamphlet is an
ambitious attempt to 'wring juice out of a flint’: to heighten his
humour by extracting it from unproductive material, and he
succeeds in uniting many of the lighter types of prose literature
in a single pamphlet. He begins by introducing a personal note
telling the public of his literary difficulties and financial em-
barrassments. These led him to leave London. In return for the
hospitality which he enjoyed at Yarmouth, he recounts the history
of that town (drawn from Camden) in a fine spirit of pageantry,
trumpeting its origin and development 'as I have scrapped out of
worm-eaten Parchments. He then treats his readers to a speci-
men of burlesque encomium, such as the Romans, Italians and
especially the German anti-Grobianists, had made popular",
working up an eulogy on the herring fisheries, not forgetting
their services to Lent (hence the title). The Prayse of the
Red Herring soon develops into a kind of jest-book. But the
tales and anecdotes no longer turn on the humiliation of
monks or the 'quicke answers' of wenches? . Nashe wittily
parodies the legends of antiquity and adapts them to the
glorification of this homely fish. How the fable of Midas, who
turned everything to gold, originated from the fact that he
ate a red herring. How Leander and Hero (after a burlesque
account of their adventures, in Nashe's best manner) were con-
verted into fish-the youth to a ling, the maiden to a Cadwallader
herring and the old nurse, who had a sharp temper, into the
mustard which always accompanies them at table. The curing of
the herring was discovered in a manner suggestive of Charles
1 Vide C. H. Herford, The Literary Relations of England and Germany, chap. VII,
pp. 381--3. Also bibl. under Burlesque Encomia.
* Cf. A C. Mery Talys, Merie Tales of Master Skelton, The Geystes of Skoggan.
## p. 328 (#350) ############################################
328 London and Popular Literature
6
Lamb's roast pig, and the first red herring was sold to the pope
by methods reminiscent of the sibyl's sale of the prophetic books.
But, besides a sense of the romance of history, and an ingenious
appropriation of classical lore, there is an unmistakable love for
the sea and sympathy with the rough, simple life of seamen.
In one place, he tells how 'boystrous woolpacks of ridged tides
came rowling in. ? Again, he describes the cobbles which skim
'flightswift thorow the glassy fieldes of Thetis as if it were the land
of yce, and sliding over the boiling desert so earely and never
bruise one bubble of it. ' And he talks of these frostbitten crab-
tree faced lads, spunne out of the hards of the towe. '
Yet, Lenten Stuffe never enjoyed the popularity of Pierce
Penilesse. With all its cleverness and narrative power, the tract
did not gratify the Londoner's interest in city life. This taste for
realistic satire and humour continually increased and tended every
year to number more educated men within its ranks. At the same
time, court circles began to grow weary of Euphuism, and to prefer
discussing their fellow-creatures rather than indulging in the
apostrophes and soliloquies of prose romances' or such poems as
Ovid's Elegies? and Venus and Adonis. These two elements com-
bined to form an upper stratum in the general reading public.
'Select' persons lived in the same city as ordinary members of the
middle classes, and were attracted by the same phenomena. But
they were more fastidiously critical, and they looked more uncom-
promisingly for the stamp of classicism in any publication of which
they were to approves. Even Sir John Harington's Rabelaisian
descents into the secrets of cloacinean burlesque (1596) are illu-
minated with bookish allusions and classical quotations. The school
of pamphleteers who had formerly secured patronage with erotic
poetry now followed, perforce, the new tendency. Thomas Lodge set
the example, in 1595, by producing a slim volume of verse eclogues
and satires, and, with a show of self-assertion made fashionable by
Nashe, he entitled the venture A Fig for Momus.
Verse satire had flourished throughout the sixteenth century,
and, in many instances, developed individual portraiture under
the guise of types. Within the last fifty years, Crowley's One and
Thirty Epigrams (1550), Bansley's Pryde and Abuse of Women
6
* Ante, vol. II, ch. XVI.
3 Marlowe.
3 Note the condescension of Peacham : Compleat Gentleman, . There is no book 80
bad, even Sir Bevis himselfe, Owleglasse, or Nashe's herring, but some commodity may
be got out of it. '
4 See bibl. under Miscellaneous Burlesques.
## p. 329 (#351) ############################################
box
FI
PX
de
PP
Rise of Formal Satire 329
(1550), Hake’s Newes out of Poules Churcheyarde (1567) and
Gosson's Quippes for Upstart Gentlewomen (1596) had covered the
most prominent abuses of the time and kept pace with the growing
spirit of puritan censoriousness. But Lodge ignored their example
and revived the new genre which Wyatt' had introduced, almost
unobserved, into English literature: the avowed imitation and
occasional paraphrase of classical models. He chose Horace for
his satirical prototype; but, attempting to copy the Roman's genial
discursiveness, he merely gave the public ten dull, ill-constructed
satires and epistles, mingled with a few Vergilian eclogues. And
yet A Fig for Momus is important. Wyatt was before his time
and, moreover, confined his animadversions to the court, in a
difficult metre borrowed from the Italian. Lodge's production is
as miscellaneous and bookish as a volume of essays. Moreover, he
made current the use of pseudonymous allusion, and, while
Gascoigne had rather unsuccessfully experimented in blank verse,
he demonstrated that classical satire could be most effectively
written in the decasyllabic couplet.
In 1597, Joseph Hall, then a young fellow of Emmanuel college,
claimed the honour of being the first English satirist with
Virgidemiarum. It is possible that Hall's satires existed in
manuscript as early as 1591, and, again, it is just conceivable that
he was unacquainted with the work of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Donne
and Lodges. But, in any case, the boast of originality was partly
justified, inasmuch as Hall discovered Juvenal as the true model
for Elizabethan and Jacobean satire. In the hands of Horace, the
Roman Satura was little more than a series of desultory conver-
sations, dominated by an unembittered scepticism of human
activities. Juvenal, however, was a rhetorician, who devoted a life's
training in oratory to the task of making out a case against society.
As such, his satires have all the uncompromising sweep of an
indictment and are enforced with every artifice of arrangement
and expression. Both his systematic thoroughness and his aggres-
sive indignation, though largely a pose, were adapted to this
contentious age, and Hall may fairly claim to be the first who
reproduced his method and spirit in English verse“.
72
inte
A
1 Ante, vol. 11, chap. vi. For popular satirists, see ibid. chap. v.
? Sat. v, however, is an imitation of Juvenal x, and a forerunner of The Vanity
of Human Wishes.
3 Vide A. B. Grosart, Occasional Issues, vol. 1x, 1879; Bp. Hall's Complete Poems,
intro. , pp. vi-viii.
* Vide A. B. Grosart, ibid. pp. viii-xiv, for list of parallel passages between Hall
and Horace, Juvenal and Persius.
## p. 330 (#352) ############################################
330
London and Popular Literature
But this originality of imitation did not fetter a very living
interest in the questions of his own day. This was an age when all
educated men discussed literary criticism', and Hall devotes the
first book of his satires to these debatable topics. He merely
champions the poetic reaction of the nineties,' when he censures
the insipidity of love poetry, declaring that Cupid has now made
himself a place among the muses, who begin to tolerate stories of
the stews. ' Academic circles, however, must already have been
preparing the way for the Augustan age, when Hall ridicules such
poets as Spenser for compiling 'worm-eaten stories of old time,'
full of invocations and strange enchantments, and when, in a
graphic description of a play-house, he represents ‘Turkish Tam-
berlaine' stalking across the stage, declaiming verses of half
Italianised English, and followed by a 'selfe misformed lout,' who
mimics his gestures, disgraces the tragic muse and sets all his
spectators in a roar? . The second and third books deal with more
general abuses. But the commonplaces of satire gain new force
and directness from the spirit of cultured irony with which Hall
invests them. The time-honoured accusation against the fee-
serving physician3 reappears in the form of a sarcastic com-
mendation". The impostures of astrology are ridiculed by a
maliciously absurd calculation on the issue of a love affairs. We
have the inevitable satire on the gallant, but the form is new.
Ruffio is seen disporting himself in 'Pawles,' “picking his glutted
teeth since late noontide. Yet, on closer inspection, we find that
his face is pinched and his eye sunken, and we realise that the
youth is starving himself to buy clothing, the fantastic embellish-
ments of which give him the appearance of a scarecrow. And
Hall's most perfect piece of workmanship is a mock advertisement
in which a “gentle squire' looks for a “trencher-chaplaine,' and, in
return for abject servility and unremitting toil, offers him 'five
markes and winter liverie? ! '
The first three books of Virgidemiarum are termed 'tooth-
less satires,' because they aim at institutions, customs or con-
ventionalities. The last three are styled 'byting,' since they
attack individuals under pseudonyms which were probably no
a
i Ante, vol. II, bibl. to ch.
