cording to the rank in society
he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him
on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to
publish a collection of panegyrics on himself--and thus gravely
stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two
brothers--one a divine and the other a physician--became students of
astronomy; then an astronomer usually ended in an almanac-maker, and
above all, in an astrologer--an avocation which tempted a man to
become a prophet. Their "sharp and learned judgment on earthquakes"
drove the people out of their senses (says Wood); but when nothing
happened of their predictions, the brothers received a severe
castigation from those great enemies of prophets, the wits. The
buffoon, Tarleton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them
at the theatre;[82] Elderton, a drunken ballad-maker, "consumed his
ale-crammed nose to nothing in bear-bating them with bundles of
ballads."[83] One on the earthquake commenced with "Quake! quake!
quake!" They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash
humorously describes their fanciful panic, "when they sweated and were
not a haire the worse." Thus were the three learned brothers beset by
all the town-wits; Gabriel had the hardihood, with all undue gravity,
to charge pell-mell among the whole knighthood of drollery; a
circumstance probably alluded to by Spenser, in a sonnet addressed to
Harvey--

"Harvey, the happy above happier men,
I read; that sitting like a looker-on
Of this worlde's stage, dost note with _critique pen_
The sharp dislikes of each condition;
And, as one carelesse of suspition,
Ne fawnest for the favour of the great;
_Ne fearest foolish reprehension
Of faulty men, which daunger to thee threat_,
But freely doest of what thee list, entreat,
Like a great lord of peerlesse liberty.--"

The "foolish reprehension of faulty men, threatening Harvey with
danger," describes that gregarious herd of town-wits in the age of
Elizabeth--Kit Marlow, Robert Greene, Dekker, Nash, &c.--men of no
moral principle, of high passions, and the most pregnant Lucianic
wits who ever flourished at one period.[84] Unfortunately for the
learned Harvey, his "critique pen," which is strange in so polished
a mind and so curious a student, indulged a sharpness of invective
which would have been peculiar to himself, had his adversary, Nash,
not quite outdone him. Their pamphlet