Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Harvey, Gabriel

HARVEY, Gabriel (1545–1630), an English writer of the Elizabethan period, was the eldest son of a rope-maker at Saffron Walden, and received his education at Christ's College and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where we find him about 1576–78 lecturing on rhetoric. Immediately afterwards he appears to have been sent abroad by his patron the earl of Leicester, to whom he refers in his Gratulationum Waldenensium libri quatuor (Lond., 1578), a collection of pieces in honour of the queen's visit to Audley End, near his native town. In 1585 he became doctor of laws. Though Harvey expresses a desire to be "epitaphed the Inventoar of the English Hexameter," his name, familiar enough to his more learned contemporaries, would probably have been well nigh forgotten had it not been for his friendship with Spenser and his hostilities with Greene and Nash. To the student of Spenser he is familiar as one of the poet's principal correspondents, and as the Hobbinol who wrote the poem prefixed to the "Faerie Queen." His quarrel with Greene and Nash was begun by Greene alluding in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) to the fact that Harvey was the son of a rope-maker; and after Greene's death it raged with ever increasing violence until the archbishop of Canterbury issued an order for the seizure of all works written by either of the combatants.

Harvey's extant publications, which contain many minor matters of interest to the student of literature, are—Ciceronianus, London, H. Binnemann, 1577; Rhetor, vel duorum dierum Oratio de Natura, Arte, et Exercitatione Rhetorica, 1577; Smithus vel Musarum Lachrymæ, Lond., 1578, in honour of the scholarly Sir Thomas Smith; Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties by him abused, 1592; Pierce's Supererogation, or a new Prayse of the Old Asse, 1598, reprinted, but inaccurately, by Mr Collier, 4to, 1868; A new Letter of Notable Contents, 1593; The Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman, by the high tituled Don Richardo de Medico Campo, 1597, reprinted in The Old Book Collector's Miscellany, Lond., 1871. See Warton's History of English Poetry, Hazlitt's edition, and J. P. Collier's Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language, Lond., 1865, under "Harvey," "Nash," and "Greene."