"As long as it is since he writ against me, so long have I given him a
lease of his life, and he hath only held it by my mercy; and now let
him thank his friends for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him,
since I do it but to show my sufficiency; and they urging what a
triumph he had over me, hath made me ransack my standish more than I
would."
In the history of such a literary hero as Gabriel, the birth has ever
been attended by portents. Gabriel's mother "dreamt a dream," that she
was delivered "of an immense elder gun that can shoot nothing but
pellets of chewed paper; and thought, instead of a boy, she was
brought to bed of one of those kistrell birds called a wind-sucker."
At the moment of his birth came into the world "a calf with a double
tongue, and eares longer than any ass's, with his feet turned
backwards." Facetious analogies of Gabriel's literary genius!
He then paints to the life the grotesque portrait of Harvey; so that
the man himself stands alive before us. "He was of an adust swarth
choleric dye, like restie bacon, or a dried scate-fish; his skin
riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment, with channels
and creases in his face, and wrinkles and frets of old age." Nash
dexterously attributes this premature old age to his own talents;
exulting humorously--
"I have brought him low, and shrewdly broken him; look on his head,
and you shall find a gray haire for euerie line I have writ against
him; and you shall haue all his beard white too by the time he hath
read ouer this booke."
To give a finishing to the portrait, and to reach the climax of
personal contempt, he paints the sordid misery in which he lived at
Saffron-Walden:--"Enduring more hardness than a camell, who will liue
four dayes without water, and feedes on nothing but thistles and
wormwood, as he feeds on his estate on trotters, sheep porknells, and
buttered rootes, in an hexameter meditation."