which must
always have had a tendency to be sour. In particular, he loathed the
school of young writers who had become famous in direct opposition to
the literary laws which he had laid down.

Harvey's wrath had found a definite excuse in the tract, called "A Quip
for an upstart Courtier, or a quaint dispute between Velvet-Breeches
and Cloth-Breeches," which Greene had published early in the year
1592. Accordingly, when he heard of Greene's death, he hastened to his
lodgings, interviewed his landlady, collected scurrilous details, and,
with matchless bad taste, issued, before the month was over, his "Four
Letters," a pamphlet in which he trampled upon the memory of Greene. In
the latest of his public utterances, Greene had made an appeal to three
friends, who, though not actually named, are understood to have been
Marlowe, Peele, and Nash.

Of these, the last was the one with the readiest pen, and the task of
punishing Harvey fell upon him.

Nash's first attack on Harvey took the form of a small volume, entitled,
"Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters," published
very early in 1593. It was a close confutation of the charges made in
Harvey's "Four Letters," the vulgarity and insolence of the pedant
being pressed home with an insistence which must have been particularly
galling to him as coming from a distinguished man of his own university,
twenty years his junior. Harvey retorted with the heavy artillery of his
"Pierce's Supererogation," which was mainly directed against Nash, whom
the disappearance of Peele, and the sudden death of Marlowe in June, had
left without any very intimate friend as a supporter. Nash retired,
for the moment, from the controversy, and in the prefatory epistle to a
remarkable work, the most bulky of all his books, "Christ's Tears over
Jerusalem," he waved the white flag. He bade, he declared, "a hundred
unfortunate farewells to fantastical satirism," and complimented his
late antagonist on his "abundant scholarship." Harvey took no notice of
this, and for four years their mutual animosity slumbered. In this same
year, 1593, Nash produced the only play which has come down to us
as wholly composed by him, the comedy of "Summer's Last Will and
Testament."

Meanwhile "Pierce Penniless" had enjoyed a remarkable success, and had
placed Nash in a prominent position among London men of letters. We
learn that in 1596, four years after its original publication, it had
run through six e