es. His well-known satirical vein, his constant use and abuse
of allusions, which often render him obscure, were so well known that it
was considered improbable that he had been writing this time with a
merely artistic aim. He had been careful to state in his dedication that
readers would merely find in his book "some reasonable conveyance of
historie and varietie of mirth," and that he was attempting a kind of
writing new to him; it was to no purpose. Readers were on the look-out
for allusions; they took his historical heroes for living people but
thinly disguised, and lined Nash's story with another of their own
invention. The author, who well knew the dangers of such
interpretations, never ceased to protest that, in this work at least,
there was no place for them. When once the public is started upon such a
track, it is no easy matter to make them turn round. Nash had recourse
to his usual revenge, that is, to laugh at his interpreters. "I am
informed," he wrote, shortly after his "Wilton" was printed, "there be
certaine busie wits abrode that seeke to anagrammatize the name of
Wittenberge to one of the Universities of England; that scorn to be
counted honest, plaine meaning men, like their neighbours, for not so
much as out of mutton and potage, but they will construe a meaning of
kings and princes. Let one but name bread, but they will interpret it to
be the town of Bredan in the Low countreyes; if of beere he talkes, then
straight he mockes the countie Beroune in France; if of foule weather or
a shower of raine, he hath relation to some that shall raigne
next."[281]

His remonstrances seem to have had very indifferent success, and Nash,
to our great loss, did not again attempt novel writing. But the vein was
in him, and it constantly reappears in the variety of pamphlets he has
left behind him. Fine scenes of comedy, good portraits of ridiculous
characters to be met in every-day life, amusing anecdotes, nearly all
the elements of a sound comic novel are scattered through his writings.
The familiar portraits of the upstart, of the false politician, of the
inventor of new sects, portraits at which many observers of human nature
in the time of Shakespeare tried their hand, are to be seen in the
gallery Nash painted in his "Pierce Penilesse."[282] Conformably to the
fitness of things, Nash described himself under the name of Pierce,[283]
as Sidney had given his high moral tone, his melancholy and loving soul
to the sh