"One epistle thereof to John Wolfe (Harvey's printer) I took and
weighed in an ironmonger's scale, and it counter poyseth a cade[91] of
herrings with three Holland cheeses. It was rumoured about the Court
that the guard meant to trie masteries with it before the Queene, and
instead of throwing the sledge, or the hammer, to hurle it foorth at
the armes end for a wager.
"Sixe and thirtie sheets it comprehendeth, which with him is but sixe
and thirtie full points (periods); for he makes no more difference
'twixt a sheet of paper and a full pointe, than there is 'twixt two
black puddings for a pennie, and a pennie for a pair of black
puddings. Yet these are but the shortest prouerbes of his wit, for he
never bids a man good morrow, but he makes a speech as long as a
proclamation, nor drinkes to anie, but he reads a lecture of three
howers long, _de Arte bibendi_. O 'tis a precious apothegmatical
pedant."
It was the foible of Harvey to wish to conceal the humble avocation of
his father: this forms a perpetual source of the bitterness or the
pleasantry of Nash, who, indeed, calls his pamphlet "a full answer to
the eldest son of the halter maker," which, he says, "is death to
Gabriel to remember; wherefore from time to time he doth nothing but
turmoile his thoughts how to invent new pedigrees, and what great
nobleman's bastard he was likely to be, not whose sonne he is reputed
to be. Yet he would not have a shoo to put on his foote if his father
had not traffiqued with the hangman.--Harvey nor his brothers cannot
bear to be called the sonnes of a rope-maker, which, by his private
confession to some of my friends, was the only thing that most set him
afire against me. Turne over his two bookes he hath published against
me, wherein he hath clapt paper God's plentie, if that could press a
man to death, and see if, in the waye of answer, or otherwise, he once
mentioned _the word rope-maker_, or come within forty foot of it;
except in one place of his first booke, where he nameth it not
neither, but goes thus cleanly to worke:--'and may not a good sonne
have a reprobate for his father?' a periphrase of a rope-maker, which,
if I should shryue myself, I never heard before." According to Nash,
Gabriel took his oath before a justice, that his father was an honest
man, and kept his sons at the Universities a long time. "I confirmed
it, and added, Ay! which is more, three proud sonnes, that when they
met the hangman, their father's best customer, would not put off their
hats to him--"
Such repeated raillery on this foible of Harvey touched him more to
the quick, and more raised the public laugh, than any other point
of attack; for it was merited. Another foible was, perhaps, the
finical richness of Harvey's dress, adopting the Italian fashions on
his return from Italy, "when he made no bones of taking the wall
of Sir Philip Sidney, in his black Venetian velvet."[92] On this the
fertile invention of Nash raises a scandalous anecdote concerning
Gabriel's wardrobe; "a tale of his hobby-horse reuelling and
domineering at Audley-end, when the Queen was there; to which place
Gabriel came ruffling it out, hufty tufty, in his suit of veluet--"
which he had "untrussed, and pelted the outside from the lining of
an old velvet saddle he had borrowed!" "The rotten mould of that
worm-eaten relique, he means, when he dies, to hang over his tomb for
a monument."[93] Harvey was proud of his refined skill in "Tuscan
authors," and too fond of their worse conceits. Nash alludes to
his travels in Italy, "to fetch him twopenny worth of Tuscanism,
quite renouncing his natural English accents and gestures, wrested
himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, painting himself like a
courtezan, till the Queen declared, 'he looked something like an
Italian!' At which he roused his plumes, pricked his ears, and run
away with the bridle betwixt his teeth." These were malicious
tales, to make his adversary contemptible, whenever the merry wits at
court were willing to sharpen themselves on him.
One of the most difficult points of attack was to break through that
bastion of sonnets and panegyrics with which Harvey had fortified
himself by the aid of his friends, against the assaults of Nash.
Harvey had been commended by the learned and the ingenious. Our
Lucian, with his usual adroitness, since he could not deny Harvey's
intimacy with Spenser and Sidney, gets rid of their suffrages by this
malicious sarcasm: "It is a miserable thing for a man to be said to
have had friends, and now to have neer a one left!" As for the others,
whom Harvey calls "his gentle and liberall friends," Nash boldly
caricatures the grotesque crew, as "tender itchie brained infants,
that cared not what they did, so they might come in print; worthless
whippets, and jack-straws, who meeter it in his commendation, whom he
would compare with the highest." The works of these young writers he
describes by an image exquisitely ludicrous and satirical:--
"These mushrumpes, who pester the world with their pamphlets, are like
those barbarous people in the hot countries, who, when they have bread
to make, doe no more than clap the dowe upon a post on the outside of
their houses, and there leave it to the sun to bake; so their
indigested conceipts, far rawer than anie dowe, at all adventures upon
the post they clap, pluck them off who will, and think they have made
as good a batch of poetrie as may be."