st witty of his productions is a satirical pamphlet in
praise of red herrings, intended as a joke upon the great staple of
Yarmouth, and the pretensions of that place to superiority over
Lowestoft. It must be confessed that Nash is chiefly famous as a caustic
pamphleteer and an unscrupulous satirist. For illustration we may point
to his battle with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Edmund Spenser, who
desired that he might be epitaphed the inventor of the not yet
naturalized English hexameter; and his other battle with Martin Mar
Prelate, or the writer or writers who passed under that name, and who
have acquired a reputation to which poor Nash can lay no claim. His one
conspicuous dramatic effort is 'Summer's Last Will and Testament.' Nash
wrote for bare existence--to use his own words, 'contending with the
cold, and conversing with scarcity.' Nash lived in an unpropitious age.
A recent French writer has placed him in the foremost rank of English
writers. Dr. Jusserand, the author referred to, in his accounts of the
English novel in the time of Shakespeare, tells us Nash was the most
successful exponent in England of the picturesque novel. The picturesque
novel is the forerunner of the realistic novel of modern times. It
portrays the life and fortunes of the picaro--the adventurer who tries
all roads to fortune. Spanish in its origin, it developed into a school
in which Defoe and Thackeray distinguished themselves. 'Nash,' writes
the French author, 'mingled serious scenes with his comedy, in order that
his romances might more nearly resemble real life.' In fact (he writes),
'Nash does not only possess the merit of learning how to observe the
ridiculous side of human nature, and of portraying in a full light
picturesque figures--now worthy of Teniers and now of Callot--some fat
and greasy, others lean and lank; he possesses a thing very rare with the
picturesque school, the faculty of being moved. He seems to have
foreseen the immense field of study which was to be opened later to the
novelist. A distant ancestor of Fielding, as Lilly and Sidney appear to
us to be distant ancestors of Richardson, he understands that a picture
of active life, reproducing only in the Spanish fashion scenes of comedy,
is incomplete and departs from reality. The greatest jesters, the most
arrogant, the most venturesome, have their days of anguish. No hero has
ever yet remained imprisoned from the cradle to the grave, and no one has