e mouth of Nash's hero, which had been carelessly treated as
autobiographical confessions of foreign travel and the like, on the part
of the author, were but features of a carefully planned fiction. "Jack
Wilton" describes the career of an adventurer, from his early youth as
a page in the royal camp of Henry VIII. at the siege of Tournay, to his
attainment of wealth, position, and a beautiful Italian wife.

The first exploit of the page is an encounter with a fraudulent
innkeeper, which is described with great spirit, and M. Jusserand
has ingeniously surmised that Shakespeare, after reading these pages,
determined to fuse the two characters, mine host and the waggish
picaroon, into the single immortal figure of Falstaff. After this point
in the tale, it is probable that the reader may find the interest of
the story flag; but his attention will be reawakened when he reaches
the episode of the Earl of Surrey and Fair Geraldine, and that in
which Jack, pretending to be Surrey, runs off with his sweet Venetian
mistress, Diamante. It will be for the reader of the ensuing pages to
say whether Nash had mastered the art of narrative quite so perfectly
as M. Jusserand, in his just pride as a discoverer, seems to think. The
romance, no doubt, is incoherent and languid at times, and is easily led
aside into channels of gorgeous description and vain moral reflection.

It will doubtless be of interest, at this point, to quote the words
in which, in a later volume, M. Jusserand has reiterated his praise of
"Jack Wilton" and his belief in Nash as the founder of the British novel
of character:--

"In the works of Nash and his imitators, the different parts are badly
dovetailed; the novelist is incoherent and incomplete; the fault lies in
some degree with the picaresque form itself. Nash, however, pointed out
the right road, the road that was to lead to the true novel. He was
the first among his compatriots to endeavour to relate in prose a
long-sustained story, having for its chief concern: the truth.... No
one, Ben Jonson excepted, possessed at that epoch, in so great a degree
as himself, a love of the honest truth. With Nash, then, the novel of
real life, whose invention in England is generally attributed to Defoe,
begins. To connect Defoe with the past of English literature, we must
get over the whole of the seventeenth century, and go back to 'Jack
Wilton,' the worthy brother of 'Roxana,' 'Moll Flanders,' and 'Colonel
Jack.'"