what it was to laugh. Curiously enough, he combined
this taste with an intense fondness for pure literature and for lyrical
poetry. Rabelais is among his masters, and so is Aretino, "one of the
wittiest knaves that ever God made." Tarleton the jester is among his
friends, and so is Kemp, the Dogberry of Shakespeare's "Much Ado," the
Peter of "Romeo and Juliet," the famous dancer who performed a morris
dance from London to Norwich. And at the same time he bestows with
unbounded enthusiasm heartfelt praises upon Spenser, "heavenly
Spenser"; upon "immortal" Sidney, whose "Astrophel and Stella" he
himself published in 1591; and upon Marlowe, as the author of the
exquisite Hero and Leander poem, "Leander and Hero of whome divine
Musaeus sung and a diviner muse then him, Kit Marlow."[262]

With all his fondness for merry authors, Nash can discern true poetry,
and he adores it. If by chance, in the midst of an angry satirical
disquisition, the word poetry comes to his pen, he is suddenly
transformed, he smiles, he melts; nothing is left in him but human
sympathies. "Nor is poetry an art where of there is no use in a man's
whole life but to describe discontented thoughts and youthfull desires,
for there is no study but it dooth illustrate and beautifie.... To them
that demaund what fruites the poets of our time bring forth, or wherein
they are able to approve themselves necessarie to the state, thus I
answere: first and formost, they have cleansed our language from
barbarisme, and made the vulgar sort, here in London, which is the
fountaine whose rivers flowe round about England, to aspire to a richer
puritie of speach than is communicated with the comminalty of any nation
under heaven."[263] When a man like Nash could write in such a strain,
with a passion for vernacular literature scarcely equalled at any time,
there was obviously growing among that "vulgar sort, here in London," a
public for any great man that might appear, a public for William
Shakespeare himself, who was just then beginning to reach celebrity.
Nash does not doubt that it is possible for English to become a
classical language, however rude the garb it first bore. According to
Nash, Surrey was "a prince in content because a poet without peere.
Destinie never defames her selfe but when she lets an excellent poet
die: if there bee any sparke of Adams paradized perfection yet emberd vp
in the breasts of mortall men, certainely God hath bestowed that his
perfect