[In the following essay, originally published in 1871, Morley provides an overview of Harvey's life, character, and career.]

When, in 1579, their old comrade at Pembroke Hall, Edward Kirke, prefixed to Spenser's first venture in verse, The Shepheardes' Calender, a letter to Gabriel Harvey, as its unnamed author's “special friend and fellow-poet,” he only told in prose what is shown by the Calender itself, where Harvey is enshrined as Spenser's Hobbinol. The difference is great between this Hobbinol as we may see him if we care to look for his true features, and the figure which stands for him in encyclopædias, in text-books, and in that lively account of the paper war between Harvey and Nash which most of us have read with natural enjoyment in Isaac D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors. Hardly a definite fact has been stated, real or imaginary, which has not had a turn given to it unfavourable to the good name of this much misrepresented scholar. A vague concession that “the friend of Spenser and Sidney could hardly have been contemptible,” is all that we have given us in the Calamities of Authors to qualify the finding of a portrait in the mere caricature produced by an unscrupulous wit, who had more genius but less worth than his antagonist, and who amused himself and the town with the extravagant exaggeration of what he took to be the weaknesses of his opponent's character. Yet there is not one—actually not one—sharp point in the indictment against Gabriel Harvey which does not break at a touch when we look from the burlesque upon him to the man himself. He did not become a great man, or what he called a “megalander;” we may, if we will, class him with what is fossil or extinct in literature—its megatherium or dodo. But in his day he worked hard, aspired nobly, and left witness to his labour and his aspiration. Perhaps we do not care, for his own sake, to read the evidence, but set him aside as one of the small matters, if any there be, in which it is not worth while to be just. Then let him have the advantage of being not merely Gabriel Harvey, although to him that was something, but also Spenser's Hobbinol, which to us is more. He was, during some important years of Spenser's life, the poet's “long-approved and singular good friend” and counsellor. The counsel was outgrown, but not the friendship. To our credence as well as Harvey's, Spenser has left what he once called “the eternal memory of our everlasting friendship, the inviolable memory of our unspotted friendship, the sacred memory of our vowed friendship;” and it is a little due perhaps to Spenser that we should ascertain how much credit is due to the commentators who would have us think that he wrote in this way to a conceited pedant seven years older than himself.

Gabriel Harvey was the eldest of four sons of a rope-maker at Saffron Walden, a prosperous man who, when his boys were young, filled the chief offices of his native town, and spent his money freely on their education. Three of the boys were sent to the neighbouring University of Cambridge, and they all three became noticeable men. The son of whom nothing is known may have succeeded to his father's business. Of the three who took to scholarship, Gabriel became, while yet a young man, in or not long before the year 1576, a lecturer on Rhetoric at Cambridge, with Cicero for his guide, and large attendance at his lectures. The year usually given as the probable date of Gabriel Harvey's birth is 1545; and then, as the date of his death is known, it has to be added that he reached the age of ninety. It does not inevitably follow that because Gabriel Harvey was at Cambridge before Spenser, and had ceased to be an undergraduate when his friend first came to college, he was—as the young would count years—a much older man; although the presumption would be fair if there were not evidence to the contrary. But then the fact seems to have been overlooked that there is rather good evidence to the contrary. Harvey's Introductory Lecture upon meeting his class at Cambridge, in the year 1577, was published as his Ciceronianus, dedicated to William Lewin, who, in a letter prefixed to it, gives his own opinion upon the most eminent masters of eloquence, and speaks of his friend Harvey as adhuc adolescentem: which he would hardly have done if Harvey had been thirty-two years old. No doubt the range of a man's years comprehended under that term might have been taken by a Roman as from seventeen to thirty; Cicero called himself adolescens at the time of his consulship when his age was forty-four, but he speaks elsewhere of five-and-twenty as the term of adolescence, and that certainly answers so well to our own usage, that Harvey could scarcely have been spoken of as adhuc adolescentem when he was thirty-two years old. It is more probable that his age did not exceed five or six-and-twenty, and that he had begun the public teaching of rhetoric in his university in the preceding year. For in the next year, 1578, his two first lectures were published as his Rhetor, and we find that, in referring modestly to the full attendance before him, while valuable teachers such as Byng and Dodington, whom he named with reverence, were lecturing to empty benches, he said that he ascribed the fulness of his class in the preceding year to students' love of novelty, but warned them that there was no more of that—“Harvey is old now, and leaves novelty to new professors.” As the introductory lecture of the preceding year was upon the occasion of his again meeting his class, we may assume that he had begun to teach in 1576, when he was—adhuc adolescens—twenty-five years old, or a year younger. The known age of his brother John was thirteen or fourteen, and Richard could not have been very much older, for he also, when he went to Cambridge in 1575, as a pensioner of Pembroke Hall, found in his brother Gabriel a guide and tutor. There was at least one sister in the family, and there might have been several intermediate in age between Gabriel and Richard. At any rate, here is good reason for believing that Gabriel Harvey, instead of being a pedantic scholar seven and more years older than his friends Spenser and Sidney, a man who could give himself some airs of seniority in social intercourse with them, was a familiar friend, with no more difference of age than is consistent, in free fellowship of youth, with equal sharing of enthusiasm and exchange of thought. Spenser and Harvey at Cambridge were both of the same college, Pembroke Hall; and Spenser was in his last year, taking his degree of M.A., when Harvey began, if he had not sooner begun, lecturing on Rhetoric. As for Philip Sidney, Oxford was his university, and although he is commonly said to have gone for a few months to Cambridge at the age of fifteen or sixteen, there is no evidence that he did so. If we would know how the strong friendship between Harvey and Sidney first arose, we must understand more than we do of the relations between Harvey and Sidney's uncle Leicester, whom Gabriel, in his Gratulationes Waldenses incidentally, and also specially in the inscription of that part of it which is dedicated to him, distinguished as “his Lord;” and who, in July, 1578, when Queen Elizabeth paid her visit to Audley End, was about to send him into France and Italy.

In Harvey's Walden Gratulations, written to commemorate the visit of her Majesty to Audley End, the great house of his native town of Saffron Walden, two significant scraps of dialogue are left upon record. An impetuous member of the University of Cambridge, there present by its representatives to pay honour to Queen Bess, stepped out of the ranks and knelt to her. The over-zealous gentleman was, let us say, about six-and-twenty years old, tall, keen of feature, swarthy, and black-haired. “Who is this man?” the Queen asked in her blunt way. “Who is this? Is it Leicester's man that we were speaking of?” And when told that it was, she said, “I'll not deny you my hand, Harvey.” In a short Latin verse exercise appended to the first of the four books of his Gratulations upon the Queen's coming to Walden and Audley End, Gabriel Harvey gives that piece of dialogue. He adds another set of verses on another saying of the Queen's upon the same occasion. “Tell me,” she said of him to Leicester, “is it settled that you send this man to Italy and France?” “It is,” said he. “That's well,” she replied; “for already he has an Italian face, and the look of a man; I should hardly have taken him to be an Englishman.” In his lines upon this theme, we have Gabriel's own witness to the dusky hue, which scoffing Nash compared to rancid bacon. Harvey's service of Leicester, here so distinctly indicated, may have led to the establishment of that warm friendship for Leicester's nephew Sidney, which breathes out of another poem in the Walden Gratulations. It certainly enabled Harvey the more safely to counsel his friend Spenser, gone northward, to leave “those hils where harbrough nis to see,” and resort to the dales with their rich shepherds and fruitful flocks. It may have been not as a poet only that Harvey sent Spenser to Leicester, though enough for Sidney that he was a poet of his own age who thought with him on the great religious questions of the day. The fact that it was Gabriel Harvey who sent Spenser to London, seems to connect this reference in 1578 to Leicester's purpose of sending Harvey abroad with the affectionate Latin hexameters addressed to his friend Harvey in October, 1579, by Edmund Spenser, then on the point of travelling into France; “dispatched by my lord, I go thither,” Spenser said, in the postscript dated from Leicester House, “as sent by him, and maintained (most what) of him; and there am to employ my time, my mind, to his honour's service.” Through those two scraps of the Queen's talk recorded in the Walden Gratulations, we come perhaps a little nearer to the prose version of Hobbinol's advice that Colin should resort to the rich shepherds of the dales.

On the occasion of the Queen's coming to Audley End, Dr. Howland, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, had notified to Lord Burleigh that he and the heads of colleges would there wait on her Majesty, and have ready some disputants on two moral questions—one, Whether Clemency or Severity be more praiseworthy in a prince; the other, of Fortune and Fate; also that they would present a book, which was in fact, a Greek Testament, bound in red velvet and gold. Burleigh chose the debate on clemency and severity, and accepted the offer of the book, upon condition that it was not to be scented with spike, which her Majesty could not abide. There must be also some gloves and a few verses for Leicester, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Christopher Hatton; Burleigh himself wanted none. The University duly appeared by dignitaries in their gowns and hoods; the Queen arrived, hot and faint, from her journey, in July weather, and went indoors; but after due refreshments the debate took place, and lasted for three hours. Mr. Fleming, of King's College, argued for clemency; Byng, Master of Clare Hall, concluded; Harvey, of Pembroke, Palmer, of John's, and Hawkings, of Peterhouse, opposed; Fletcher, of King's College, was moderator; but the Lord Treasurer, as Chancellor of the University, took on himself to interfere, and cut short all repetitions or long discourses by way of confutation with the dictum, “Loquor ut Cancellarius, disputa dialecticè.” There is, in the library of the British Museum an old copy of Quintilian, which once belonged to Gabriel Harvey, and has wide margins liberally besprinkled, in some places crammed, with notes in his firm and elegant handwriting. On the blank space at the end we find him fortifying himself for this conflict, using Quintilian as a whetstone to his wit, and labelling references to sections on extempore speech, memory, pronunciation, audacity, and courage, and against all manner of diffidence and despair as—“My notes against my disputation at Audley End, in the Court, before my Lord Treasurer, my Lord of Leicester, and in the Queen's hearing.” He writes under this a sound reflection, founded on the popularity among Italians of the artificial style of Aretino: “Unico Aretino—in Italian, singular for rare and hyperbolical amplifications. He is a simple orator that cannot mount as high as the quality or quantity of his matter requireth. Vain and fantastical amplifications argue an idle brain. But when the very majesty and dignity of the matter itself will indeed bear out a stately and haughty style, there is no such trial of a gallant discourser and right orator. Always an especial regard to be had of decorum, as well for orators and all manner of parleys as in other actions.” Is this the thought which animates fantastic pedantry? The notes here quoted are at the end of the book, before the fly-leaf, which is covered with citations from many authors, made, apparently, in view of the same occasion, and therefore before July, 1578. The rest of the notes, which are part Latin, part English, and the incessant light underlining of words as the whole book was read carefully, pen in hand, belong chiefly to the following year; for in a closing memorandum Harvey sets down that he had read the book through again from the beginning, in September, 1579, and compared it with Cicero ad Brutum and Ramus, meaning, no doubt, Ramus's ‘Brutinæ Quæstiones.’ The notes often illustrate pleasantly their writer's character, and give his estimate of the reputations of contemporary scholars. It is interesting, for example, to find him noting as “tria vividissima Britannorum ingenia,” Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, and Bishop Jewell; to which he adds, as the next triad, “tres florentissimas indoles,” Heywood, Sidney, and Spenser. “Qui quærit illustriorum Anglorum ingenia, inveniet obscuriora,” from which censure he excepts, he says, a very few, and first of them Sir Thomas Smith, Ascham, Wilson, Digges, Blundeville, Hakluyt, “mea corcula”—my favourites.

But how little of a dry pedant young Gabriel Harvey was, we can learn without reference to MS. if we will only look into his three published lectures, delivered, as the custom was, in Latin. In his introductory lecture, upon returning to the University in 1577, he says, after the fashion of wit in his day, that during the vacation he had been breakfasting on Tully, dining on Cæsar, and supping on Virgil. He will not say with which viand he took nectar, with which wine, and with which beer, but will speak of the talk of the guests, which is the sweetest seasoning of banquets. He then characterises the style of different writers. A friend had said that it would be less wonderful that Duffield should leave his philosophy than Harvey the eloquence he loves and exalts supra mundum, supra modum. Philosophers, says Harvey, are not always prophets; and he proceeds at once emphatically to recant much that he had taught in the preceding year. He had followed those Italians—Bembo, Sadolet, Nizolius—who exalted above all things the Ciceronian style, and had detested men who were not absolute Cicero-worshippers, as Erasmus, More, and Budé. He had abused Politian and Pico della Mirandola. He cites his own old Ciceronian formulas for the beginnings of speeches and letters, speaks of the delight he had in big Roman capitals, as IVP. O. M. “I produce,” he said, “my folly to make you wiser. I worshipped M. T. as the god of Latinity, and would rather have been a Ciceronian than a saint.” But he had since fallen upon Jean Sambuc's Ciceronianus. It had made him think, and sent him to the study of the old masters of Latinity. From that he had gone to the Ciceronianus of Peter Ramus, and to that of Professor Freig, of Basle, and to a preface by Sturmius, of Strasburg, and he had learned now to look at the ground and roots of Ciceronian eloquence; to relish the independent thought in Pico, and Erasmus, and Politian; to look for the whole man in a writer as the source of style, and, still exalting Cicero, to attend first to the life and power of the man, and not to the mere surface polish of his language. Let every man, he says, learn to be, not a Roman, but a Frenchman, German, Briton, or Italian. That certainly is not the lecture of a pedant rigid in the forms to which he had been bred. And the manliness of scholarship grew upon Harvey. In one of the MS. notes made by him three years later on the margin of his Quintilian, a sentence of the text suggests to him that Mr. Ascham, “in his fine discourse of Imitation, is somewhat too precise and scrupulous for Tully only, on all points; we having such excellent and dainty choice in the Latin tongue, worthy to be regarded and resembled in fitting place,” and then he cites, with a differently defining adjective to each, nearly a score of authors. On another page he notes that a man without Greek is half learned; as Ascham said in joke of Mr. Haddon, though he loved him dearly, that he fluttered on one wing.

Thus Gabriel Harvey won honour to himself at Cambridge while he was training his two younger brothers, Richard and John. Richard was a lively pupil, ready to turn Latin verse on any subject, and warmly attached to his brother. He had Gabriel's fervid spirit without his discretion. He passed through a course of medicine and philosophy to study for the Church, and held a vicarage at the time when his brother John, who had obtained a physician's degree from his University, died—twenty-nine years old—at Lynn, in Norfolk, where he had been establishing himself in practice. Dr. John Harvey was a quiet, studious man, who wrote little books indicating healthy tastes and calm judgment. But the Rev. Richard was restless and impulsive. He plunged into the Marprelate controversy; he played prophet; he attacked the wits of the town as “piperly players and makebates;” and it was he who brought the wits down on himself, and provoked them, in the reckless fashion of the time, to scoff at all his family.

Then Gabriel's resentment of an insult diverted the enemy's fire, and it was he who had to bear the whole brunt of the battle. He had at that time left Cambridge; and having in 1585 obtained grace for a degree of D.C.L. at Oxford, was practising in London as an advocate in the Prerogative Court.

Gabriel Harvey was a man of quick parts and high character—ardent, impressible, with a keen interest in intellectual pursuits, and a critical appreciation not exceptional, but modified and bounded by the notions of his time and by the studies of the University. He stood for an influential class, and fairly represented it. We have always been told to believe, on the authority of Thomas Nash, that he was ashamed of his father, the rope-maker; and encyclopædists have it that he ostentatiously claimed kindred with Sir Thomas Smith, another Saffron Walden man, who had been, with Cheke, joint chief of the Greeks at Cambridge, and who died a Secretary of State in 1577. But his writings, and those of his brothers, show that Gabriel Harvey was warmly and openly attached to his family and to his native town. Evidently not in boast of worldly position, but as the most natural reply to a libel on the old man's character, in the course of the Nash controversy, Harvey made known that his father, twenty years before, held the chief offices in his town, and that he had spent a thousand pounds upon the education of his sons. These were the public evidences of his father's worth. Again, it is not true that Harvey showed eagerness to claim Sir Thomas Smith as one of his relations. The reverse is true. He avoided the boast. As a Cambridge scholar and Saffron Walden man who had a reputation for his Latin verse, Gabriel Harvey followed an old custom in producing Smithus, vel Musarum Lacrymæ, upon the death of a scholar who was one of the chief glories of his University, who also was of Saffron Walden, and to whom, he says, he had looked up as his model of life, studies, and character. It seems that there was a family connexion: for in one of his later letters Harvey speaks very incidentally of Sir Thomas Smith's son as cousin. But in this series of laments, or “Tears of the Muses,” they are the Muses who speak for themselves in their own character, and some of them exalt the scholar they mourn by naming him as of their kindred. When speaking in his own person, at the opening and close of his work, to Walter Mildmay and to Sir John Wood, Smith's nephew and late secretary, Harvey is far from claiming, as it seems he could have claimed, a family connexion with the man whose memory deserved his honour.

Again, it has been said, in the pleasant book, The Calamities of Authors, that Gabriel Harvey's vanity caused him to publish a collection of panegyrics upon himself. Where is it? Can it be that the title of the four books of the ‘Gratulations of Walden,’ a collection of laudatory Latin epigrams and poems upon Queen Elizabeth, Leicester, Burleigh, and three other personages of the Court—the third of them, and dearest of all, Harvey's friend, Philip Sidney—can it be that this volume, produced in honour of the Queen's visit to Walden and Audley End, has been mistaken for a set of panegyrics on its editor? Or is such a description given to the nine pages of verses on the Harvey and Nash quarrel attached to the 229 pages of Pierce's Supererogation? This is the sort of attention and justice clever men get from posterity when they have once been well covered with abuse from which it is nobody's particular business to defend them, and when they have not achieved in their lives anything great enough to draw on them the general attention of their countrymen in after times.

On the authority of Nash, Gabriel Harvey and his brothers John and Richard have been confounded in one common charge of a ridiculous addiction to astrology. Thoughtful men of their time believed in the influences of the stars, and our language attests the old strength and prevalence of such convictions. But of these Harveys, as before said, Richard alone was an enthusiastic student of astronomy; and it was against him and his ‘Astrological Discourse upon the great and notable Conjunction of the two Inferior Planets, Saturn and Jupiter, on the 28th of April, 1583,’ that Nash, in a passage of ‘Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil,’ levelled his abusive wit. Richard's unlucky astrological prediction was addressed at its close—“From my father's house in Walden … to my very good and most loving brother, Master Gabriel Harvey, at his chamber in Trinity Hall.” Gabriel then held a fellowship of Trinity. That Gabriel Harvey, had he been at Walden, would have discouraged, as he had before discouraged, his younger brother's astrological enthusiasm, is evident from the opening of this treatise: “Good brother, I have in some part done my endeavour to satisfy your late request, wherein you advertise me either not so much to addict myself to the study and contemplation of judicial astrology, or else by some sensible and evident demonstration to make certain and infallible proof what general good I can do my country thereby, or what special fruit I can reap thereof myself.” John Harvey, the other brother, published in 1588 ‘A Discoursive Problem concerning Prophecies; how far they are to be valued or credited, according to the surest Rules and Directions in Divinity, Philosophy, and other Learning;’ but this was written for the purpose of confuting and condemning superstitious faith in traditions and pretended prophecies, and it especially undertook to examine and reject an old prophecy of terrible things which were to happen in 1588, though admitting that this year might see the prologue to serious events of which the five acts and the epilogue would in due time probably follow. One of Gabriel Harvey's letters, printed without his knowledge and against his wish, was set forth as containing “a short and sharp judgment on earthquakes.” As the set of letters to which this belongs is known through Haslewood's reprint in 1815 of ‘Ancient Critical Essays,’ and Haslewood left out the earthquake letter because the matter of it was foreign to his purpose, the world has assumed pretty generally, from its title only, that here Gabriel displayed his addiction to astrology. But the letter exactly accords with the spirit in which he had sought to abate Richard's astrological enthusiasm. It reports to Spenser talk of the night before over an earthquake of which the shock had just been felt—the earthquake of 1580, which set in motion the pens of Arthur Golding, Thomas Churchyard, and many others—and Harvey repeats the argument he had then held, that earthquakes proceed from natural causes, and that although doubtless it is in the power of God miraculously to produce them, it is not the business of man to treat them superstitiously. He speaks with supreme contempt of the crop of pamphlets and prophecies that the recent earthquake shock was likely to produce. In the same letter Harvey reported Cambridge news with a sharpness of censure which, when these private letters were printed without his knowledge, by an injudicious friend, made it his duty to apologise to the Cambridge authorities. In the course of the Nash quarrel, when a distorted version of this is cast up against him, he admits that he was then unduly irritated because he had failed in his application for the office of Orator to the University.

That he was unduly irritated in the Nash quarrel is quite as true. Gabriel had just laid his brother John, the young physician, in the grave, when a gross attack on the whole family, provoked by his brother Richard, came into his hands. It consisted only of a few lines, which were afterwards expunged from the satire, Greene's ‘Quip for an Upstart Courtier,’ in the text of which they had been interpolated. The copies which contained it were destroyed, and we do not know what the scoffs were which caused Gabriel to come to town, determined to proceed by law against the libeller. He found Greene dying miserably, and his judgment was so far overpowered by his anger, that he allowed himself to be urged into a written expression of it after Greene was dead. Yet there are earnest and generous thoughts blended with the words of wrath, and there is a pathetic strain of earnestness in the whole letter which contains Gabriel's reference to his dead brother, and record of his latest words to him: “Oh, brother, Christ is the best physician, and my only physician. Farewell, Galen—farewell human arts. There is nothing divine upon earth except the soul aspiring towards heaven.”

I do not justify the temper of the Harvey and Nash quarrel, but I do protest against any continuance of the belief that students are reading literary history when they find in Isaac D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors this quarrel made the basis of a misrepresentation of all facts in the life of a man whom Sidney and Spenser honoured as their friend—a misrepresentation which extends even to so trifling a detail as the suggestion that “it became necessary to dry up the floodgates of these rival ink-horns by an order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The order is a remarkable fragment of our literary history, and is thus expressed: ‘That all Nashe's bookes and Dr. Harvey's bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found, and that none of the said bookes be ever printed hereafter.’” It is, indeed, a remarkable fragment, for it is quoted with omission of the fact that this was not a condemnation special to Harvey and Nash, but part of a general excommunication of books by which, in the year 1599, Whitgift and Bancroft made themselves ridiculous. They ordered the burning of Marston's Pygmalion, of Marlowe's Ovid and of his Satires, of Hall's Satires, of the Epigrams of Davies and others, of the Caltha Poetarum, besides Nash's and Harvey's books; and decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed for the future. Indeed, says Warton, in that year “the Hall of the Stationers underwent as great a purgation as was carried on in Don Quixote's library.” Had the Calamities of Authors been then in existence, probably that learned and entertaining book would also have gone to the fire, and one author, at least, would have been spared the additional calamity of being known to the world, less by what he said than by what Isaac D'Israeli said of him.