aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface,
amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate
the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many
picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us
so frequently in doubt as to his meaning. If this was the result of the
imitation of Aretino, Nash's choice of a master was scarcely a fortunate
one.

Thomas Nash was now thirty-two years of age, and with the publication of
"Lenten Stuff" we lose sight of him. His old play of "Summers' Last Will
and Testament" was printed in 1600, and he probably died in that year.
The song at the close of that comedy or masque reads like the swan-song
of its author:--

Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure;
Gone is our sport, fled is poor [Nash's] pleasure!
Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace;

Ah! who shall hide us from the winter's face?
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease:

From winter, plague and pestilence,
Good Lord, deliver us!

London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn,
Trades cry, Woe worth that ever they were born;
The want of term is town and city's harm.

Close chambers we do want, to keep us warm;
Long banished must we live from our friends:
This low-built house will bring us to our ends.

From winter, plague and pestilence,
Good Lord, deliver us!

Whether pestilence or winter slew him, we do not know. In 1601
Fitzgeoffrey published a short Latin elegy on Nash in his "Affaniae,"
alluding in happy phrase to the twin lightnings of his armed tongue
and his terrible pen; and Nash had six lines of tempered praise in "The
Return from Parnassus." But all we know of the cause or manner of Nash's
death has to be collected from a passage in "A Knight's Conjuring,"
1607, written by the satirist on whom his mantle descended, Thomas
Dekker. Nash is seen advancing along the Elysian Fields:--

"Marlowe, Greene, and Peele had got under the shades of a large vine,
laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their college, still
haunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that followed him here
upon earth; for Nash inveighed bitterly, as he had wont to do, against
dry-fisted patrons, accusing them of his untimely death, because if they
had given his Muse that cherishment which she mos