o obvious source of income for some considerable
time. How the son of a poor Suffolk minister contrived to live in
London throughout the years 1590 and 1591, it is difficult to imagine.
Certainly not on the proceeds of a single pamphlet. It is not credible
that Nash published much that has not come down to us. Perhaps a tract
here and there may have been lost.{1} He probably subsisted by hanging
on to the outskirts of education. Perhaps he taught pupils, more likely
still he wrote letters. We know, afterall, too little of the manners of
the age to venture on a reply to the question which constantly imposes
itself, How did the minor Elizabethan man of letters earn a livelihood?
In the case of Nash, I would hazard the conjecture, which is borne out,
I think, by several allusions in his writings, that he was a reader to
the press, connected, perhaps, with the Queen's printers, or with those
under the special protection of the Bishops.

1 One long narrative poem, the very name of which is too
coarse to quote, was, according to Oldys, certainly
published; but of this no printed copy is known to exist.
John Davies of Hereford says that "good men tore that
pamphlet to pieces." I owe to the kindness of Mr. A. H.
Bullen the inspection of a transtript of a very corrupt
manuscript of this work.

His only production in 1591, so far as we know, was the insignificant
tract called "A Wonderful Astrological Prognostication," by "Adam
Fouleweather." This has been hastily treated as a defence of "the
dishonoured memory" of Nash's dead friend Greene against Gabriel
Harvey. But Greene did not die till the end of 1592, and in the
"Prognostication" there is nothing about either Greene or Harvey. The
pamphlet is a quizzical satire on the almanac-makers, very much in the
spirit of Swift's Bickerstaff "Predictions" a hundred years later.
Of more importance was a preface contributed in this same year to Sir
Philip Sidney's posthumous "Astrophel and Stella." In this short essay
Nash reaches a higher level of eloquence than he had yet achieved, and,
in spite of its otiose redundancy, this enthusiastic eulogy of Sidney is
pleasant reading.

In 1592, doubtless prior to the death of Greene, Nash published the
earliest of his important books, the volume entitled "Pierce Penniless
his Supplication to the Devil." This is a grotesque satire on the vices
and the eccentricities of the age. As a specimen of prose style