Nash's Lenten Stuff Containing the Description and First Procreation and Increase of the Town of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk With a New Play, Never Praise of the RedHerring Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Nash's Lenten Stuff: Containing the Description and First Procreation and Increase of the Town of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk; With a New Play, Never Played Before of the Praise of the Red-Herring

Such was the miserable cry of an author by profession in the reign of Elizabeth. Nash not only renounces his country in despair, and hesitates on the faulty means which have appeased the pangs Of many of his unhappy brothers, but he proves also the weakness of the moral principle among these men of genius; for he promises, If any Maecenas bind me to him by his bounty, or extend some round liberality to me worth the speaking of, I will do him as much honour as any poet of my beardless years shall in England; but, he adds, if I be sent away with a flea in my ear, let him look that I will rail on him soundly; not for an hour or a day, while the injury is fresh in my memory, but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the world when I am dead, to be a living image to times to come of this beggarly parsimony. He made his supplication to the Devil because he had not then found his Patron Saint. At page 90 he has found his man. He calls him one of the bright stars of nobility, and glistering attendants on the true Diana. He is also the matchless image of honour, and magnificent rewarder of virtue; Jove's eagle-born Ganymede; thrice noble Amyntas This description fits no one so perfectly as it does the young Earl of Southampton. It sets before us the very image of youth, which Shakespeare calls more lovely than Adonis. We know that Nash was under the patronage of Shakespeare's friend. In the year I 94 he dedicated his work, The Unfor tunate Traveller; or, the Life Jack ilton, to the Earl of Southampton, with a reference to the difference betwixt it and earlier writings and this work so that there is no doubt of Pierce Penniless being inscribed to the Earl of Southampton in person, if not by name, or that N ash's was the alien pen that had followed Shakespeare in writing privately to the Earl.

At the close of Nash's university career, about 1587, he went up to London, where he joined Greene, who had also been educated at St. John's College, and after spending a few years in visiting the Continent, and moving about from place to place without any settled employment, he at length took up his abode in Lendon as a literary adventurer. His pugnacious propensity hurried him at once into the contest with, the Puritans in the Martin mar-prelate controversy. He attacked them with their own favourite weapons of ridicule and invective, and proved more than a match for them. An Almond for a Parrot, or Gotbert garry-entrees Almes; Martin's Month's Mind; A Countereufl' given to Martin Junior, &c., following each other in rapid succession, overwhelmed his opponents with a shower of humourous sallies and cutting jibes. Such a clever satirist could scarcely fail to attract notice. Accordingly he soon became a reigning wit at supper-tables, and a choice boon companion among literary men of pleasure.

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