"To a bead-roll of learned men and lords, he appeals, whether he be an
asse or no?"
Harvey had said, "Thomas Nash, from the top of his wit looking down
upon simple creatures, calleth Gabriel Harvey a dunce, a foole, an
ideot, a dolt, a goose cap, an asse, and so forth; for some of the
residue is not to be spoken but with his owne mannerly mouth; but he
should have shewed particularlie which wordes in my letters were the
wordes of a dunce; which sentences the sentences of a foole; which
arguments the arguments of an ideot; which opinions the opinions of a
dolt; which judgments the judgments of a goose-cap; which conclusions
the conclusions of an asse."[94]
Thus Harvey reasons, till he becomes unreasonable; one would have
imagined that the literary satires of our English Lucian had been
voluminous enough, without the mathematical demonstration. The
banterers seem to have put poor Harvey nearly out of his wits; he and
his friends felt their blows too profoundly; they were much too
thin-skinned, and the solemn air of Harvey in his graver moments at
their menaces is extremely ludicrous. They frequently called him
_Gabrielissime Gabriel_, which quintessence of himself seems to have
mightily affected him. They threatened to confute his letters till
eternity--which seems to have put him in despair. The following
passage, descriptive of Gabriel's distresses, may excite a smile.
"This grand confuter of my letters says, 'Gabriel, if there be any wit
or industrie in thee, now I will dare it to the vttermost; write of
what thou wilt, in what language thou wilt, and I will confute it, and
answere it. Take Truth's part, and I will proouve truth to be no
truth, marching ovt of thy dung-voiding mouth.' He will never leave me
as long as he is able to lift a pen, _ad infinitum_; if I reply, he
has a rejoinder; and for my brief _triplication_, he is prouided with
a _quadruplication_, and so he mangles my sentences, hacks my
arguments, wrenches my words, chops and changes my phrases, even to
the disjoyning and dislocation of my whole meaning."
Poor Harvey! he knew not that there was _nothing real_ in ridicule,
_no end_ to its merry malice!
Harvey's taste for hexameter verses, which he so unnaturally forced
into our language, is admirably ridiculed. Harvey had shown his taste
for these metres by a variety of poems, to whose subjects Nash thus
sarcastically alludes:--
"It had grown with him into such a dictionary custom, that no may-pole
in the street, no wether-cocke on anie church-steeple, no arbour, no
lawrell, no yewe-tree, he would ouerskip, without hayling in this
manner. After supper, if he chancst to play at cards with a queen of
harts in his hands, he would run upon men's and women's hearts all the
night."
And he happily introduces here one of the miserable hexameter conceits
of Harvey--
Stout hart and sweet hart, yet stoutest hart to be stooped.
Harvey's "Encomium Lauri" thus ridiculously commences,
What might I call this tree? A lawrell? O bonny lawrell,
Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto;
which Nash most happily burlesques by describing Harvey under a
yew-tree at Trinity-hall, composing verses on the weathercock of
Allhallows in Cambridge:--
O thou wether-cocke that stands on the top of Allhallows,
Come thy wales down, if thou darst, for thy crowne, and take the
wall on us.
"The hexameter verse (says Nash) I graunt to be a gentleman of an
auncient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clyme of our's
hee cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his
plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man
running vpon quagmires, vp the hill in one syllable and down the dale
in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which he
vaunts himself with amongst the Greeks and Latins."
The most humorous part in this Scribleriad, is a ludicrous narrative
of Harvey's expedition to the metropolis, for the sole purpose of
writing his "Pierce Supererogation," pitted against Nash's "Pierce's
Pennilesse." The facetious Nash describes the torpor and pertinacity
of his genius, by telling us he had kept Harvey at work--
"For seaven and thirtie weekes space while he lay at his printer's,
Wolfe, never stirring out of doors, or being churched all that
while--and that in the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the
ragingest furie of the last plague where there dyde above 1600 a weeke
in London, ink-squittring and saracenically printing against mee.
Three quarters of a year thus immured hee remained, with his spirits
yearning empassionment, and agonised fury, thirst of revenge,
neglecting soul and bodies health to compasse it--sweating and dealing
upon it most intentively."[95]
The narrative proceeds with the many perils which Harvey's printer
encountered, by expense of diet, and printing for this bright genius
and his friends, whose works "would rust and iron-spot paper to have
their names breathed over it;" and that Wolfe designed "to get a
privilege betimes, forbidding of all others to sell waste-paper but
himselfe." The climax of the narrative, after many misfortunes, ends
with Harvey being arrested by the printer, and confined to Newgate,
where his sword is taken from him, to his perpetual disgrace. So much
did Gabriel endure for having written a book against Tom Nash!
But Harvey might deny some of these ludicrous facts.--Will he deny?
cries Nash--and here he has woven every tale the most watchful malice
could collect, varnished for their full effect. Then he adds,
"You see I have brought the doctor out of request at court; and it
shall cost me a fall, but I will get him howted out of the Vniuersitie
too, ere I giue him ouer." He tells us Harvey was brought on the stage
at Trinity-college, in "the exquisite comedie of Pedantius," where,
under "the finical fine schoolmaster, the just manner of his phrase,
they stufft his mouth with; and the whole buffianisme throughout his
bookes, they bolstered out his part with--euen to the carrying of his
gowne, his nice gate in his pantofles, or the affected accent of his
speech--Let him deny that there was a shewe made at Clarehall of him
and his brothers, called Tarrarantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum
Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia; and another shewe of the little minnow
his brother, at Peter-house, called Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a
frensie." The sequel is thus told:--"Whereupon Dick came and broke the
college glass windows, and Dr. Perne caused him to be set in the
stockes till the shewe was ended."
This "Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a frensie," was not only the
brother of one who ranked high in society and literature, but himself
a learned professor. Nash brings him down to "Pigmey Dick, that lookes
like a pound of goldsmith's candles, who had like to commit folly last
year with a milk-maid, as a friend of his very soberly informed me.
Little and little-wittied Dick, that hath vowed to live and die in
defence of Brutus and his Trojans."[96] An Herculean feat of this
"Duns furens," Nash tells us, was his setting Aristotle with his heels
upwards on the school-gates at Cambridge, and putting ass's ears on
his head, which Tom here records in _perpetuam rei memoriam_. But
Wood, our grave and keen literary antiquary, observes--
"To let pass other matters these vain men (the wits) report of Richard
Harvey, his works show him quite another person than what they make
him to be."
Nash then forms a ludicrous contrast between "witless Gabriel and
ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the
great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up atheistical
questions, which Nash maliciously adds, "as I am afraid the earth
would swallow me if I should but rehearse." And at his close, Nash
bitterly regrets he has no more room; "else I should make Gabriel a
fugitive out of England, being the rauenousest slouen that ever lapt
porridge in noblemen's houses, where he has had already, out of two,
his mittimus of Ye may be gone! for he was a sower of seditious
paradoxes amongst kitchen-boys." Nash seems to have considered himself
as terrible as an Archilochus, whose satires were so fatal as to
induce the satirised, after having read them, to hang themselves.
How ill poor Harvey passed through these wit-duels, and how profoundly
the wounds inflicted on him and his brothers were felt, appears by his
own confessions. In his "Foure Letters," after some curious
observations on invectives and satires, from those of Archilochus,
Lucian, and Aretine, to Skelton and Scoggin, and "the whole venomous
and viperous brood of old and new raylers," he proceeds to blame even
his beloved friend the gentle Spenser, for the severity of his "Mother
Hubbard's Tale," a satire on the court. "I must needes say, Mother
Hubbard in heat of choller, forgetting the pure sanguine of her
Sweete Feary Queene, artfully ouershott her malcontent-selfe; as
elsewhere I have specified at large, with the good leaue of vnspotted
friendship.--Sallust and Clodius learned of Tully to frame artificiall
declamations and patheticall invectives against Tully himselfe; if
Mother Hubbard, in the vaine of Chawcer, happen to tel one canicular
tale, father Elderton and his son Greene, in the vaine of Skelton or
Scoggin, will counterfeit an hundred dogged fables, libles, slaunders,
lies, for the whetstone. But many will sooner lose their liues than
the least jott of their reputation. What mortal feudes, what cruel
bloodshed, what terrible slaughterdome have been committed for the
point of honour and some few courtly ceremonies."
The incidents so plentifully narrated in this Lucianic biography, the
very nature of this species of satire throws into doubt; yet they
still seem shadowed out from some truths; but the truths who can
unravel from the fictions? And thus a narrative is consigned to
posterity which involves illustrious characters in an inextricable
network of calumny and genius.
Writers of this class alienate themselves from human kind, they break
the golden bond which holds them to society; and they live among us
like a polished banditti. In these copious extracts, I have not
noticed the more criminal insinuations against the Harveys; I have
left the grosser slanders untouched. My object has been only to trace
the effects of ridicule, and to detect its artifices, by which the
most dignified characters may be deeply injured at the pleasure of a
Ridiculer. The wild mirth of ridicule, aggravating and taunting real
imperfections, and fastening imaginary ones on the victim in idle
sport or ill-humour, strikes at the most brittle thing in the world, a
man's good reputation, for delicate matters which are not under the
protection of the law, but in which so much of personal happiness is
concerned.