or and delight in words which is one of the characteristics of the men
of the Renaissance. To deal with words was in itself a pleasure for
them; they liked to mould, to adopt, to combine, to invent them. Word
painting delighted them; Nash has an extreme fondness for it, and
satirical and comical as he is, he often astonishes us by the poetic
gracefulness of his combinations of words. In this as in many other
particulars he imitates, _longe sequens_, the master he seems to have
admired above others, Rabelais, who, in the tempestuous roll of his
diverse waters, sometimes washes up on to the sand pearls fit to adorn
the crown of any lyrical poet. Fishes appear in Nash's otherwise
unpoetical prose as "the sea's finny freeholders;" the inhabitants of a
port town do not sow corn, "their whole harvest is by sea;" they plough
"the glassy fieldes of Thetis." He has an instinctive hatred for
abstract terms; he wants expressive words, words that shine, that
breathe, that live. Instead of saying that Henry III. _granted_ a
charter and certain privileges in a particular year of his _reign_, he
will write that "he _cheard up their blouds_ with two charters more, and
in Anno 1262 and forty-five of his _courte keeping_, he permitted them
to wall in their towne."[269] The pleasure of replacing stale,
commonplace expressions by rare, picturesque, live ones, and in lieu of
a plain sentence to give an allegorical substitute, has so much
attraction for Nash, that clear-sighted as he is, he cannot always avoid
the ordinary defects of this particular style, defects which he has in
common with many of his contemporaries, not excluding Shakespeare
himself, namely, obscurity and sometimes bad taste.

Another of Nash's tendencies, which he has most decidedly in common with
Rabelais, consists in the use of a number of expressions in the same
sentence for the same idea. Of course one carefully chosen word would
be enough; such a man as Merimee, to take an example at the other
extremity of the line, picks out the one term he wants, puts it in its
place; word and place fit exactly; there is nothing to add or desire.
Not so Rabelais; not so either his admirer Nash; the newly-awakened
curiosities of the Renaissance were too young as yet, too fresh and
strong upon them, to be easily kept down by rule and reflection.
Literature too was young then, and young things are endowed with eyes
that stare and admire more easily than old ones. When entering their