real sympathy at the same time with great English poetry, and he never wavered in his admiration of Surrey, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Thomas Watson. ‘The poets of our time … have cleansed our language from barbarism,’ he wrote in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse.’ His own excursions into verse are few, but some of the lyrics in ‘Summers Last Will’ come from a poet's pen. His rich prose vocabulary was peculiar to himself as far as his English contemporaries were concerned, and he boasted, with some justice, that he therein imitated no man. ‘Is my style,’ he asks, ‘like Greene's, or my jests like Tarleton's?’ On euphuism, with its ‘talk of counterfeit birds or herbs or stones,’ he poured unmeasured scorn, and he tolerated none of the current English affectations. But foreign influences—the influences of Rabelais and Aretino—are perceptible in many of the eccentricities on which he chiefly prided himself (cf. Harvey, New Letter, in Grosart's edit. i. 272–3, 289). Like Rabelais and Aretino, he depended largely on a free use of the vernacular for his burlesque effects. But when he found no word quite fitted to his purpose, he followed the example of his foreign masters in coining one out of Greek, Latin, Spanish, or Italian. ‘No speech or wordes,’ he wrote, ‘of any power or force to confute or persuade but must be swelling and boisterous,’ and he was compelled to resort, he explained, ‘to his boisterous compound words’ in order to compensate for the great defect of the English tongue, which, ‘of all languages, most swarmeth with the single money of monosyllables.’ ‘Italianate’ verbs ending in ize, such as ‘tyrannize or tympanize,’ he claims to have introduced to the language. Like Rabelais, too, Nash sought to develop emphasis by marshalling columns of synonyms and by constant reiteration of kindred phrases. His writings have at times something of the fascination of Rabelais, but, as a rule, his subjects are of too local and topical an interest to appeal to Rabelais's wide circle of readers. His romance of ‘Jack Wilton,’ which inaugurated the novel of adventure in England, will best preserve his reputation.
His contemporaries acknowledged the strength of his individuality. Meres uncritically reckoned him among ‘the best poets for comedy.’ Lodge described him more convincingly as ‘true English Aretine’ (Wits Miserie, p. 57), while Greene suggestively compared his temper with that of Juvenal. In the ‘Returne from Pernassus’ (ed. Macray, p. 87), full justice is done him. ‘Ay, here is a fellow,’ one critic declares, ‘that carried the deadly stock [i.e. rapier] in his pen, whose muse was armed with a gag tooth [i.e. tusk], and his pen possessed with Hercules' furies.’ Another student answers:
Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest,
And then for ever with his ashes rest.
His style was witty, tho' he had some gall,
Something he might have mended, so may all;
Yet this I say, that for a mother's wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.
Middleton very regretfully lamented that he did not live to do his talents full justice (Ant and Nightingale, 1604). Dekker, who mildly followed in some of Nash's footsteps, strenuously defended his memory in his ‘Newes from Hell,’ 1606, which was directly inspired by ‘Piers Penniless,’ and was reissued as ‘Knights Conjuring’ in 1607. Into Nash's soul (Dekker asserts) ‘the raptures of that fierce and unconfineable Italian spirit was bounteously and boundlessly infused.’ ‘Ingenious and ingenuous, fluent, facetious,’ are among the phrases that Dekker bestows on his dead friend. Later Dekker described Nash as welcomed to the Elysian fields by Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, who laughed to see him, ‘that was but newly come to their college, still hunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that followed him here upon earth, inveighing against dry-fisted patrons, accusing them of his untimely death.’ Michael Drayton is more sympathetic:
Surely Nash, though he a proser were,
A branch of laurel well deserved to bear;
Sharply satiric was he.
Izaak Walton described Nash as ‘a man of a sharp wit, and the master of a scoffing, satirical, and merry pen.’
Besides the works noted, Nash was author of a narrative poem of the boldest indecency, of which an imperfect manuscript copy is among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library. Oldys in his notes on Langbaine's ‘Dramatick Poets’ asserts that the work was published. John Davies of Hereford, in his ‘Paper's Complaint’ (‘Scourge of Folly’) mentions the shameless performance, and declares that ‘good men's hate did it in pieces tear;’ but whether the work met this fate in manuscript or print Davies leaves uncertainb. In his ‘New Letter of Notable Contents.’ Harvey had denounced Nash for emulating Aretino's licentiousness. In his ‘Haue with you to Saffron Walden’ (iii. 44) Nash admitted that poverty had occasionally forced him to prostitute his pen ‘in hope of gain’ by penning ‘amorous Villanellos and Quipassas’ for ‘new-fangled Galiardos and senior Fantasticos.’ These exercises are not
