Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/91

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
H
85
H

the first inventor of the English hexameter; and declares that he saw his name ‘cut with a knife in a wall of the Fleet’ when he went to visit a friend there. Harvey replied in his ‘Pierce's Supererogation,’ taking Nashe's criticisms on the ‘Foure Letters’ seriatim, and vindicating himself from the latter's charges. Nashe, who at this stage appears to have been becoming heartily ashamed and weary of the controversy, now sought to bring it to an end by making a formal and graceful apology in an epistle prefixed to his ‘Christes Teares over Jerusalem’ (1593), and frankly admitting Harvey's ‘aboundant schollarship, courteous well gouerned behauiour, and ripe experienst judgement.’ Even this, however, failed to appease his antagonist, and Harvey returned to the attack in his ‘New Letter of Notable Contents.’ To this Nashe rejoined in a new epistle prefixed to a new edition of ‘Christes Teares,’ in which he withdrew his former apology, and retorted on Harvey in the severest terms. In 1596, hearing that Harvey was boasting of having silenced him, he published his famous satire, ‘Have with you to Saffron Walden,’ which he dedicated by way of farce to ‘Richard Lichfield, barber of Trinity College, Cambridge;’ and to this Harvey once more rejoined in his ‘Trimming of Thomas Nashe’ (1597). The scandal had, however, now reached a climax, and in 1599 it was ordered by authority ‘that all Nashes bookes and Dr. Harvey's bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found, and that none of the same bookes be ever printed hereafter’ (Cooper, Athenæ Cant. ii. 306).

During the latter years of his life Harvey appears to have lived in retirement in his native town. The parish register gives the date of his death as 11 Feb. 1630–1. Baker says: ‘I have seen an elegy on him, composed by W. Pearson, dated Ao 1630 [–1] … By that it should seem he practised physic, and was a pretender to astrology, and so was his brother, R. H.’ (see Baker MS. in Cambr. Univ. Library, xxxvi. 98–107).

The following is a list of Harvey's principal Latin writings: 1. ‘Rhetor, sive 2. Dierum Oratio de Natura, Arte et Exercitatione Rhetorica,’ 1577. 2. ‘Ciceronianus, sive Oratio post reditum habita Cantabrigiæ ad suos auditores,’ 1577. 3. ‘Smithus, vel Musarum Lachrymæ pro Obitu honoratiss. Viri … Thomæ Smith, Esq. aur., Majestatisque Regiæ Secretarii,’ 1578. 4. ‘Χαῖρη vel Gratulationum Valdensium Libri quatuour [sic],’ 1578. His English works, as edited by Dr. Grosart in three volumes, comprise the following: 1. ‘The Story of Mercy Harvey,’ 1574–5. 2. ‘Letters to and from Edmund Spenser,’ 1579–80. 3. ‘Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets,’ 1592. 4. ‘A Letter of Notable Contents,’ &c., 1593. 5. ‘Precursor of Pierce's Supererogation [1593], and Pierce's Supererogation, or a new Prayse of the Olde Asse,’ 1593. 6. ‘The Trimming of Thomas Nashe,’ 1597. His ‘Letter Book’ (Sloane MS. 93 in Brit. Mus.), comprising letters dated 1573–80, was edited by Mr. E. J. L. Scott for the Camden Society.

[Memorial-Introductions in Dr. Grosart's edition; Prof. G. C. Moore Smith's Introduction to his edition of the Latin Play Pedantius, Louvain, 1905; Haslewood's Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, vol. ii.; Professor Hales's Preface to Spenser's Works (Globe ser.); Brydges's Restituta, vol. iii.; Preface to Letter Book, edited by E. J. L. Scott; Baker MSS.; Nashe's Works, ed. Grosart.]

HARVEY, Sir GEORGE (1806–1876), painter, was born at St. Ninians, Stirlingshire, in February 1806. Shortly after his birth his father, a watchmaker, settled in the town of Stirling, and here the boy was apprenticed to a bookseller. At the age of eighteen his devotion to art brought him to Edinburgh, where he studied for about two years in the Trustees' Academy. In 1826 he exhibited his first picture of a ‘Village School’ in the Edinburgh Institution, and in the same year he became one of the original associates of the Scottish Academy, to whose first exhibition in 1827 he contributed seven works. He now devoted himself to figure pictures, of which the subjects were derived from the history and the daily life of the Scottish nation. Among these may be named ‘Covenanters Preaching,’ 1829–1830; ‘Covenanters' Baptism,’ 1830–31; ‘The Curlers,’ 1834–5; ‘A Schule Skailin',’ 1846; and ‘Quitting the Manse,’ 1847–8; works, characterised by homely truth and excellent insight into Scottish character, which have become widely popular through engravings. His other important figure-pictures include ‘Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy,’ 1836–7; ‘A Castaway,’ 1839; ‘First Reading of the Bible in the Crypt of St. Paul's,’ 1839–40; and ‘Dawn revealing the New World to Columbus,’ 1852. He produced a few portraits, such as those of Professor John Wilson, 1851, and the Rev. Dr. John Brown, 1856. Though most widely known by his figure-pictures, he ranks even higher as a landscape-painter. In this department of art his execution is singularly spontaneous and unlaboured, and in the expression of the very spirit of border landscape, of the quiet sublimity of great stretches of rounded grassy hills, he proves himself, in works like ‘The Enterkin,’ 1846, without a rival among Scottish painters. His land-