SOURCE: McKerrow, Ronald B. Introduction to The Works of Thomas Nashe, Vol. I, pp. 110-36. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1904.

One of the most interesting, and at the same time most difficult, branches of the biography of a man of letters, is that which investigates the books with which he was familiar and which influenced him in his own work. To do this satisfactorily in the case of an author like Nashe, whose reading seems to have been both discursive and peculiar, would need an acquaintance with the literature of the sixteenth century, both English and foreign, such as very few possess, and to which I certainly make no claim. Nevertheless something can be done towards such an inquiry. Nashe can be proved to have been acquainted with a fair number of more or less well-known works, and the date at which he read some of them can be approximately determined. No doubt these were but a small part of the literature with which he was familiar, and possibly not one of them was among the books which had the deepest influence upon him, but still they interested him sufficiently for him to make use of them in his own writings, and they are therefore worth our attention.

It is indeed one of the difficulties of this particular line of study that the books by which a writer has been most profoundly affected may be just those which have left the least definite traces in his work. They will have been in a manner absorbed into himself, and their influence may result in a subtle modification of his whole mental attitude, in a change in the point of view rather than in opinion or in expression: his work may bear on every page the impress of another mind without he himself or his reader being once conscious of imitation. If then he does not himself give us some unmistakable hint of his devotion to such reading, it is highly probable that its influence upon him may never be detected.

Far easier to trace is another kind of borrowing; when a man studies for a particular purpose, deliberately gathering and digesting his material in order to put it forth in his own language and coloured by his own modes of thought. Detection of this kind of indebtedness is as a rule merely a matter of search, though there may sometimes be great difficulty in deciding, between two or three possible sources of information, which was the one actually employed.

But if Nashe had made use of the work of others in these two ways alone, our investigation of his reading would give but scanty and vague results. Fortunately many of his borrowings are of neither of these kinds. He, as indeed almost all the prose writers of his time, set himself deliberately to produce a kind of artistic composition, following in some measure the accepted precepts of rhetoric, in which the effect should be heightened by all the well-known devices of ornament. Among such rhetorical devices the use of examples or similes was, of course, one of the most important,¹ whether intended to add weight to an argument or to give pleasure to the reader; and there seems to be evidence that it was a usual practice to keep note-books in which striking phrases, images or examples met with in the course of reading might be treasured up for future use. The keeping of such commonplace books is advocated in many works on the study of Latin,² and it was very natural that the same method should be followed by those anxious to excel in the writing of English.

That Nashe himself was accustomed to rely upon such aids is to be inferred from a passage in his Lenten Stuff, where as some excuse for the deficiencies of the work, he complains that in the country, where he is writing, he is bereft of his note-books.³ Indeed we might, I think, conclude from internal evidence alone, that he habitually made much use of them. The illustrations with which he decks out all his writings are in very many cases too close to the original in wording for them to have been written down from memory. Yet we can hardly suppose that Nashe on needing an example or simile would turn over in his mind what he had recently read, and finding something suitable, would then refer to the book itself in which it occurred and copy it out.⁴ Had he done this we should expect to find a book much used at one time and afterwards never referred to again, for he could hardly have kept in his memory the whereabouts of passages which had struck him in his reading of months or years before. On the contrary, however, when he has made great use of a particular book in one of his pamphlets, we not infrequently find stray quotations from it in work of a later date. This is precisely what would happen if, when he read it, he had jotted down in his note-book such things as struck him. In his next work he might find occasion to use most of these, but a few would inevitably be left over, and would be employed later when an opportunity arose.

It is these short quotations and borrowings with which Nashe's work is interspersed, which give us the best evidence of the books which he had read, for, as I have said, he commonly keeps very close to the original, and this exactitude of quotation, probably due rather to laziness than to any desire for accuracy, enables us in a large number of cases to decide among several possible sources of a statement or image which was the one actually employed. Indeed, so little attempt does Nashe make, as a rule, to digest his material and to put it into his own words, that it is, I believe, possible to mark a number of passages as almost certainly borrowed, though we may be unable to trace them to their origin.

Before we proceed further with our investigation into the books which he used, a word of warning is necessary, as to the danger of confounding immediate with ultimate sources and assuming in Nashe too great a knowledge of the classics. In my notes will be found many references to Plutarch, Aelian, Diogenes Laertius, Aristotle and other Greek writers, as authorities for various apophthegmata, anecdotes, and ‘facts’ of natural history. I wish to say once for all that I do not believe that in any single case Nashe borrowed directly from these authors, or even from Latin versions of them, but that my citation of them is merely intended to imply that they are, so far as I am aware, the ultimate sources for the material.

It needs but little acquaintance with the literature of the end of the sixteenth century to lead one to suspect that the Greek and Roman writers of classical times were far from being the common or favourite reading of the average English literary man, and that, enormous as is the ultimate debt of Elizabethan literature to the classics, it is hardly at all a debt at first hand. No one who is likely to read Nashe will need to be reminded of the very great number of collections of apophthegms, stories, fables, &c., drawn from the classics—or from each other—that are to be found in the Latin literature of the time. There is hardly any scrap of information, hardly any apophthegm, or any simile, that does not occur over and over again in these books, while even apart from such professed collections of independent scraps, the whole literature of philosophical, moral, and humorous works simply abounds in quotations and illustrations of the same kind. The difficulty is not as a rule to find a modern authority for an apparent borrowing from the classics, but to discover among so many books, for the most part little remembered, which in the time of one's author were most popular, and which he is most likely to have used.

It may be thought that the simplest and most useful way of dealing with such a question as Nashe's reading would be to construct a table in which should be set forth the number of borrowings which have been found in each of Nashe's works from each author that he used, for one could then see what books he read at the different periods of his life and how much he was indebted to each. As a matter of fact one could see nothing of the sort. Such a table—as tables of this kind generally are—would be not only useless but actively misleading.

In the first place, any conclusion based on numbers alone would be vitiated by the great number of Latin sayings which were then current as proverbs. Take for example such a phrase as ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico’, which originally comes from Tacitus, or ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’, from Pliny.⁵ It need hardly be pointed out that the use of such sayings does not in any way show that the person who employs them had read Tacitus or Pliny: he very likely had no notion of their source. Nor, to take an example of a different kind, does a knowledge of such a common tale as that of the philosopher who fell into a well when looking at the stars, imply a reading of Diogenes Laertius, in whose work, I believe, it first appears. Many at the present day who have been familiar since childhood with the stories of Androclus and the lion, and of Archimedes and the crown of Hiero—the εὕρηκα story—might be puzzled to name off-hand the authority for them.

Many of these commonplaces may be dismissed at once as of no significance in regard to an author's reading, but there are many others which are on the border line, quotations or stories which, though fairly familiar, might under some circumstances indicate a knowledge of the work from which they originally came. Thus while a single quotation, say from the Aeneid, would not show that the writer had been reading Vergil, two or three from the same book, occurring in close proximity to one another, would certainly suggest that he had.

But a still stronger reason against attempting to construct the table of which I spoke is that it is yet too soon to do so. Further investigation would undoubtedly disturb the results. For example in the note on i. 42. 23-30, I quote a passage from an epistle attributed to Pelagius, of which Nashe gives a word-for-word translation. Whether Pelagius himself borrowed it from elsewhere, I cannot say, but of this I feel practically certain, that it was not in the epistle of Pelagius that Nashe found it. The page in which it occurs is one of several which I am convinced were borrowed by Nashe wholesale from writers of the fifteenth or sixteenth century—just as, for example, a great part of pp. 15-19 is derived from two English works of Nashe's own time. I have been fortunate in finding certain works upon which Nashe drew largely for his scraps of classical knowledge, such as the Parabolae of Erasmus and the De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum, but there were evidently others which I have not been able to identify. These will no doubt be found in time, and when found may throw much new light on Nashe's reading. When all, or nearly all, his out-of-the-way scraps have been found in places where he is likely to have come across them, a satisfactory study of the sources which he used may be possible.

Before he began his literary career, Nashe would, of course, at school and at the University, have read no small amount. In the first place he would have worked through a number of text-books; but unfortunately it is not easy to obtain precise information as to the books most used in the Elizabethan schools.⁶ We may be certain that he would have a thorough knowledge of Lily's Grammar, and would have learnt by heart the quotations from Latin authors which appear therein as examples of the several rules. At the same time he would probably have become familiar with the Sententiae Pueriles,⁷ and perhaps with the Pueriles Confabulatiunculae.⁸

From such works he would most likely pass to the study of a collection of Aesopic fables in Latin, and of some of the numerous books of Colloquies. The best known of these was undoubtedly the Colloquia Familiaria of Erasmus, but this was in subject-matter suited for older students than those who would study it for its Latin, and in many schools other dialogues seem to have been preferred, such as those of Vives, the Dialogi sacri of Castellion,⁹ and perhaps the Colloquia of Corderius, though this work seems to have been more popular a little later. Nevertheless, whether he read them at school or not, we may, I think, include the Colloquies of Erasmus as almost certainly among the books which would be known to Nashe, though I have found little definite trace of them.¹⁰ We may suppose that he would also have read Erasmus' De Conscribendis Epistolis, or one of the other treatises on the same subject,¹¹ and the De Copia Verborum. Somewhat later he would no doubt study one or more of the text-books on Rhetoric, but it is hard to say which he would be most likely to use. He mentions Susenbrotus and Talaeus,¹² whose works on the subject were widely employed,¹³ and may at some time or other have studied them. Of the best-known English work on the subject, Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric, I have come across no definite trace. The rest of his studies, in logic, mathematics, physics, and theology, of all which subjects he would, in the ordinary course, obtain some knowledge, are likely to have had less influence upon his later work, and even if we wished to do so, it would be impossible to discover the books which he made use of.

Of the works of the classical authors we may fairly suppose him to have been conversant with Terence, the letters of Cicero, and probably his De Officiis and rhetorical works, some plays of Plautus, the Eclogues of Vergil and part at least of the Aeneid, the Epistles and Satires of Horace, and most of Ovid, which last he would have read partly as a task and partly for his own pleasure. Of Latin verse of the sixteenth century he would probably know thoroughly the Eclogues of Baptista Spagnuoli, called Mantuanus, and have at least looked through the Zodiacus Vitae of Palingenius. I do not, of course, mean to limit him to these authors, many others could be named of which he must have known something, but those which I have mentioned would, I think, have been familiar to every student of the time, while what was read beyond these would depend, more or less, upon the master and the school.

Apart, however, from his studies, Nashe would naturally have read a certain amount of English and probably some Latin for his own pleasure. The only definite piece of information which he gives us on this point is that while he was at Cambridge he read Lyly's Euphues and admired it greatly,¹⁴ but we may presume that he knew a good part of the lighter English literature of the time—in Nashe's school-days there was not much, all told—and probably a certain number of more important works, such as the Encomium Moriae, More's Utopia, and Ascham's Schoolmaster.

All these books would, of course, be read or studied with no particular thought of their being useful to him as affording material for future writings of his own, but during or before the composition of his Anatomy of Absurdity Nashe seems to have gone through certain works with the deliberate intention of gleaning from them such passages as he thought himself able to turn to account.

The Anatomy of Absurdity, more than any other book of Nashe, gives one the impression of being made up almost entirely from the works of others, and this is perhaps not unnatural. Not only would his fondness for Euphues, and the fact that he was still a student at Cambridge, impel him to interlard his work with fragments of apparent learning, citations from the classics, and borrowed similes, but his small experience of life could hardly yet have provided him with material for the display of his real talents. There are, as I have said elsewhere, a number of passages which I believe to have been borrowed, but of which I have not yet found the source. As it is, the passages which I have shown to be taken almost word for word from other writers make up, together with the acknowledged quotations, a very considerable part of the whole.

The greatest number of borrowings from a single work is from the Parabolae or Similia of Erasmus. In this compilation we find some twenty-three¹⁵ images derived from Plutarch, Pliny, and Seneca, which Nashe has incorporated in the Anatomy. In some cases there seems to be clear evidence that they came to him through the Parabolae¹⁶; in others, where Erasmus keeps close to his author's words, no absolute proof is possible, but it is natural to assume the same source for all.

Besides those passages from Seneca which were probably taken by way of Erasmus, there are a few others,¹⁷ including one of ten lines in length, which seem to have come either directly from the Epistolae, or through some other medium. I am inclined to think that the latter is more probable.

A couple of pages, about the advantages of diversity in diet, are taken from the Saturnalia of Macrobius, but this passage also was, I think, probably borrowed at second hand, for I have been unable to discover any others which seem to come from the same source, and this in spite of the fact that there is much of which Nashe might have made use.¹⁸

Throughout the piece Nashe shows considerable familiarity with Ovid, though the number of actual quotations is small.¹⁹ He had apparently been reading the Metamorphoses in Golding's version, for in two cases the English rather than the Latin is followed.²⁰ There is, however, no reason to deny him a knowledge of the original.

Six passages, one of which is several lines in length,²¹ are taken from the De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum of Cornelius Agrippa, a work of which Nashe seems to have been very fond and of which he made constant use.²²

There are in the Anatomy some traces of the influence of Lyly,²³ but they do not amount to much. Two works of a Euphuistic type, however, Gosson's Ephemerides of Phialo and Melbancke's Philotimus, furnished between them a good part of pp. 15-19. The only other English works cited seem to be Sir T. Elyot's Castle of Health,²⁴ and Bevis of Hampton.²⁵ A passing reference to Castiglione's Courtier²⁶ indicates that Nashe knew something of the book, but, so far as I can discover, he made little use of it. A passage in it is, however, alluded to in Have with You to Saffron-Walden.²⁷

Nashe's next work, the Preface to Greene's Menaphon, being for the most part a straightforward, if at times obscure, pronouncement upon contemporary literature, is not of a nature to include many borrowings from others. In one case,²⁸ however, he seems to have been indebted to the Parabolae of Erasmus, of which he had made so much use in his Anatomy. The only work professedly quoted from is Stanyhurst's translation of Vergil,²⁹ but several others are mentioned, among them Golding's translation of Ovid, Phaer's of Vergil,³⁰ Watson's Amintas, and Antigone, Matthew Roydon's epitaph on Sidney, and Peele's Arraignment of Paris, with all which we may presume Nashe to have had some acquaintance.

Leaving aside the anti-Martinist tracts, which, being of doubtful authorship, can give us no help in our inquiry, we come to the short preface written to introduce Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591. This contains three or four quotations from Ovid, but tells us nothing of Nashe's reading at the time. There is, however, an interesting reference to a translation of Sextus Empiricus,³¹ which had lately been made ‘for the benefit of vnlearned writers’.³² Whether Nashe regarded himself as coming within this category I cannot say, but he made considerable use of Sextus—presumably in this translation—in his later work.

In the following year was published Nashe's most popular tract, Pierce Penilesse, which is remarkable for containing the largest unacknowledged loan—or theft—which has up to the present been detected in his works, namely the incorporation of practically the whole of G. Pictorius' tract De illorum Daemonum qui sub lunari collimitio versantur ortu … Isagoge. In the present edition the borrowed passage occupies some twelve pages, about an eighth of the whole.

Apart from this, the only new reading that I have been able to trace is the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, from which we have several borrowings.³³ For reasons which I need not repeat here, it seems to me practically certain that use was made of the English translation.³⁴

There is, however, one other book which I strongly suspect that Nashe had read, or at least glanced through at about this time, namely the Politica of Justus Lipsius, a book which is practically composed of quotations from the classics arranged so as to illustrate or exemplify political maxims. There is, indeed, no direct evidence that Nashe had used it, for though in Pierce Penilesse he does once casually mention Lipsius, it is only to attribute to him an opinion, which, so far as I can discover, he never expressed, at least not in so many words. Yet, as Pierce Penilesse contains at least three quotations³⁵ which are to be found in the Politica, and as there is somewhat stronger evidence in Nashe's later work³⁶ that he was acquainted with the book, it seems well to mention it here.

An interesting reference is that to the praise of Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and Sir Thomas More, by Du Bartas in his Seconde Semaine.³⁷ As I have stated in the notes, I cannot learn that the passage had been translated into English so early, but I do not think that this is any reason for supposing that Nashe had read the work in the original French. Du Bartas' reference to the three English authors would certainly be well known, though I have not fortuned to light upon it in English before this date.

The only other point which we need notice in connexion with Pierce Penilesse is the large number of quotations from Ovid which the work contains. There are seven from the Amores, six from the Tristia, and about half a dozen from his other writings. We have also, for the first time, evidence of some acquaintance with Horace, whose Epistles provide five quotations, or possibly six; but, as Harvey hinted,³⁸ most of the quotations in Pierce Penilesse are hackneyed and the collection of them required little reading or research.

Save for a single passage which may have been taken from him,³⁹ there is little trace of Cornelius Agrippa in Pierce Penilesse, but in another work written almost certainly in the same year, though a few months later, namely Summer's Last Will and Testament, the borrowings from the De Incertitudine are very numerous indeed. There are in that work more than twenty passages which seem almost certainly to have been thence derived, as well as a number of others which possibly or probably came from the same source.⁴⁰

The most interesting of the borrowings in Summer's Last Will is, however, the long discourse in praise of the dog,⁴¹ which I have been able to trace to its source in Sextus Empiricus. For the reasons explained in the note on the passage, I believe that Nashe must in several cases have followed the actual phrasing of the English translation.

In the Anatomy of Absurdity Nashe had made some use of Melbancke's Philotimus, and he perhaps had in his note-book a few scraps from this work left over. At any rate we find in Summer's Last Will a single passage which is almost certainly borrowed from it,⁴² and I cannot bring myself to believe that any one would read Philotimus twice for pleasure. There are a few quotations from Ovid and from Horace, but nothing of any significance; and three scraps are taken from Terence, all from the Eunuchus,⁴³ which Nashe may have been reading at the time. There are also three borrowings from Aulus Gellius⁴⁴—whether direct or at second hand, I cannot say.

Nashe's next work, Strange News, being merely a reply to Harvey's Four Letters, and keeping pretty close to its subject, naturally contains little borrowed matter. Nashe had a plain tale to tell and had little need of artistry to set it off. The pamphlet shows in general the same reading as the last two works, save that, so far as I can discover, Sextus is not represented. We have, as usual, some borrowings—four at least—from Cornelius Agrippa, one (incorrect) quotation from Aulus Gellius,⁴⁵ five or six from Horace, mostly of course from the Epistles, and the same number from Ovid.

In one respect, however, Strange News is not without interest to us, for it contains the only direct evidence⁴⁶ of any real knowledge on Nashe's part of the work of Pietro Aretino, in the shape of a citation of a passage from the prologue of his play La Cortigiana.⁴⁷ Nashe, however, does not cite the passage quite correctly, and it is, of course, possible that he got it at second hand. A passing reference to the Galateo of Giovanni della Casa may also be noticed.⁴⁸ On the whole, we may, I think, say that Strange News gives us little or no information about Nashe's reading.

The Terrors of the Night, however, which was probably first written about the same time, is very different, and should tell us much. It is impossible to resist the impression that a great part of it must have been derived from but one or two sources, but unfortunately I have been unable to discover what these sources were. Many of the dreams, apparitions, &c., which are described, are to be met with in several places, but no work known to me seems to have been largely drawn upon or to give the material in a form sufficiently close to that in which it appears in the Terrors of the Night for it to be regarded as a possible source. With another writer one might suppose the book to be the result of much reading in a great number of works, of leisurely digestion, and of reproduction more or less from memory: but such was never Nashe's method; he would assuredly have quoted here, as elsewhere, word for word. Some day, I doubt not, the true source or sources of this tract will be discovered: in the meantime it is better not to make vague guesses which will certainly be proved incorrect.

In passing, we may, however, note a reference to Froissart⁴⁹ occurring in a passage which may be Nashe's own.⁵⁰ It is not quite correct, and was perhaps from memory. A brief mention of the list of devils in Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft⁵¹ shows that Nashe must have had some knowledge of that work, which he had already referred to in Strange News,⁵² but I have been unable to identify any certain borrowings from it.

We come next to the Unfortunate Traveller. The historical groundwork of this story, such as it is, was evidently taken from the chronicles, chiefly from those of Lanquet and Sleidan, with perhaps an occasional reference to Holinshed. Apart from these we find no evidence of any new reading. Agrippa is drawn upon some five times, and one statement seems to come from Sextus Empiricus.⁵³ Five Latin quotations may have been taken from the Politica of Lipsius,⁵⁴ of which, as has been said, Nashe possibly made some use in Pierce Penilesse. An interesting point is the quotation of two lines from Marlowe's translation of the Amores of Ovid.⁵⁵ This is not generally supposed to have been printed much before 1599, but it may, of course, have circulated earlier in manuscript.

Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, which, though printed earlier than the Unfortunate Traveller, was probably written later, gives us evidence of the reading of at least one book—apart from that especially used as the source of the work—with which Nashe has not previously showed any acquaintance, namely the Confessions of St. Augustine. From this, two passages of some length are quoted.⁵⁶ There are several other references to St. Augustine⁵⁷ in Christ's Tears, but, so far as I can discover, no clear evidence of the reading of any work of his other than the Confessions.

The account of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, which forms the main subject of Nashe's book, is taken from Joseph ben Gorion's History of the Latter Times of the Jews' Commonweal, but this seems to have been simply used for the purpose in hand and to have left no trace elsewhere.

Another work which Nashe seems to have read at about this time is the Defensative against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies of Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, from which two passages in Christ's Tears are almost certainly derived.⁵⁸ Apart from this we have the usual borrowings from Agrippa, a certain number of quotations from Ovid, and also a good many scraps of natural history, derived originally from Aristotle and from Pliny, but probably coming to Nashe through some intermediate source which I have not traced.

At about this time Nashe issued Marlowe's Dido, to some extent, we may suppose, revised or completed by himself. As I have said in the notes,⁵⁹ the author or authors of the play would seem to have gone directly to the Latin text of the Aeneid for their material, and not to have relied at all on the translations—a point, I think, in favour of the work being in the main Marlowe's. Dido shows also much knowledge of Ovid, but its connexion with Nashe is so obscure that it is unnecessary for us to discuss it further.

In the somewhat long interval between the writing of Christ's Tears and that of Have with You to Saffron-Walden, Nashe read two or three books of which he afterwards made use in his own productions. The most important of these is Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, of which I have found no trace in his earlier work, but which in Have with You is borrowed from some twenty times. The passages used are to be found in all parts of the work, but the sections which seem chiefly to have attracted Nashe's attention are the descriptions of Russia given in the accounts of the voyages of Richard Chancellor and Anthony Jenkinson, the voyage of John Lok to Guinea in 1555, and the second and third voyages of Sir John Hawkins in 1564-8 to Guinea and the West Indies.

In Have with You we also find some eight or nine borrowings from Jean Bodin's Methodus ad Historiarum Cognitionem, a work which seems to have been very popular in its day, but which is hardly the kind of reading which we should have expected to prove attractive to Nashe. He may, however, merely have glanced through it casually, and coming across a few passages which struck him, have copied out these for future use. About half the borrowings which I have been able to identify are to be found within ten pages of Bodin's work, and all come from the first half of it.

Nashe's reading was certainly varied, for in this same work he draws upon a book of a very different character from those of Hakluyt and Bodin, namely John Bale's Acts of the English Votaries. One may indeed wonder what can have led him to peruse and even to quote from such an abominable legend of lies as this ‘exposure of the monastic system’,⁶⁰ than which hardly anything more malignant has disgraced even the literature of theological controversy. He can hardly have read it as current literature, or on account of any interest which it could possess for him, for it belonged to a class of books almost forgotten at the date. Can he have thought that ‘bilious Bale’, notorious above all men for the violence of his controversial methods, was a fit study for one who wished utterly to demolish Gabriel Harvey?

In Have with You we find some further evidences of a study of the Chronicles. Holinshed is once referred to, for his story of a performing flea,⁶¹ and a scrap about the punishment of theft in Richard I's time seems to be taken from him.⁶² In two other cases where I have noted borrowings from him, Nashe may rather have obtained his material from Froissart,⁶³ whose Chronicles he had referred to, perhaps at second hand, in the Terrors of the Night, and was to use later in his Lenten Stuff. Elsewhere we find a curious passage concerning Tetzel and the indulgences of Leo X, which is borrowed from the Famous Chronicle of Sleidan or Philippson, used by Nashe in the Unfortunate Traveller.⁶⁴ Lastly the Historia Anglica of Polydore Vergil is drawn upon to point a comparison between Wolsey, whom Nashe seems to have hated,⁶⁵ and Gabriel Harvey,⁶⁶ and once also the same work seems to be quoted when Nashe apparently believed himself to be citing the Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster.⁶⁷

For the rest, the reading shown is much the same as in Nashe's earlier works. There are more than twenty quotations from Ovid, the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Metamorphoses supplying most of them, and a few from other classical authors. The De Incertitudine of Cornelius Agrippa is still largely used, affording material for some eleven passages.

The last work of Nashe which is known to us, Lenten Stuff, was apparently written under circumstances of some difficulty. The author tells us ‘of my note-books and all books else here in the countrey I am bereaued’,⁶⁸ and though we must not take this quite literally, it is evident that he had not with him all the books which he commonly used.⁶⁹ On the other hand, if we are to believe him when he claims to have searched Bede, Polydore Vergil, Buchanan, and Camden's Britannia for information about sea-ports,⁷⁰ he must have had access to a respectable library. Indeed, the work shows throughout signs of a good deal of miscellaneous reading, though the books used are not all easy to discover.

For the story of Yarmouth itself, the principal sources are, as I have said elsewhere, Camden's Britannia and an account of the town very similar to one which has been preserved in manuscript. Hakluyt's Principal Navigations seems to have been accessible, and is quoted or referred to more than once.⁷¹ There is also an allusion to Mandeville,⁷² which, however, may be at second hand, for, so far as I can discover, Nashe does not elsewhere show any knowledge of him. Froissart is once quoted,⁷³ and there are some references to Sir Walter Manny which may have been partly taken from him,⁷⁴ though certain particulars seem to come from some other source which I have not identified.

The only other work which we can assume Nashe to have read while engaged in the composition of Lenten Stuff is the Rudens of Plautus, which is several times quoted. It should, I think, be possible to find some general source for the greater part of the list of works upon trifling or ridiculous subjects, given on pp. 176-7, but this I have been unable to do.

Our investigation of Nashe's reading has not, perhaps, given much result. The books with which we can prove him to have been acquainted must have been but a small part of those which he read, but nevertheless there are, I think, few authors of Nashe's time whose reading can be traced, or at least has been traced, even so far as has been possible in the case of Nashe. It would of course be easy to add to the list by including those works of which he himself speaks,⁷⁵ but many of those had no perceptible influence upon his own writings, and if we are to include all which there is reason to think that he must at one time or another have glanced through, we should have to mention a good part of the literature of the period. Even in the case of works which do indeed seem to be borrowed from, I have thought it best to pass over several of which I have found but few or doubtful traces. So constant was the borrowing from one another of writers of the time, that a single passage, however closely it may correspond with one in another work, is quite valueless as evidence that the writer of it had ever seen that work.⁷⁶

There are, however, two authors whose names must be mentioned in this connexion. It has been said that Nashe ‘was well versed in the Italian satires of Pietro Aretino’ and ‘was doubtless familiar with the work of Rabelais’, and that ‘foreign influences—the influences of Rabelais and Aretino—are perceptible in many of the eccentricities on which he chiefly prided himself’.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, so far as I have been able to discover, no one has pointed out any definite cases of imitation of these writers or borrowing from them,⁷⁸ and the sole proof of any acquaintance on Nashe's part with the work of either seems to be the single allusion in Strange News to the prologue of La Cortigiana.⁷⁹ The statement seems indeed to be based upon nothing more than a passage in Harvey's New Letter, where a fondness for them is charged against Nashe by his bitter enemy.⁸⁰

It is indeed true that Nashe often speaks in praise of Pietro Aretino, and even expresses a desire to imitate his style, though he fails to make it clear in what precise respect it seemed to him so admirable.⁸¹ But Aretino's name was proverbial for the force of his satire, and it may be that Nashe in setting him up as an exemplar to be followed meant no more than that he wished his own work in English to have something of the vivacity and force of Aretino's in Italian. If this was all, we may perhaps say that he succeeded at least partially in his aim, but beyond such vague and general resemblance of tone or intention, I have been unable to discover any points of similarity whatever between the work of the two writers. At the same time I must confess that my knowledge of the Italian satirist is but superficial. To read his work in the original demands more than the limited knowledge of Italian which I possess, and I have therefore been obliged to rely upon those French or English translations which were accessible to me.

But even if we do not acknowledge that Nashe was perceptibly indebted to Pietro's work, there is, of course, no reason for denying to him all acquaintance with it. Though, as I have said elsewhere,⁸² I believe that in England Pietro was more talked about than read, it is quite likely that translations of some of his works existed and that Nashe had seen them. It must be remembered that in any case he could not have made much use either of the Ragionamenti or of the plays. They are for the most part essentially Italian and even local in spirit, and it is hard to see how borrowings from or imitations of them could find a place in such writings of Nashe as have come down to us.

The case of Rabelais is very different. Here we have a writer who certainly might, and, I think, almost certainly would, have afforded much material⁸³ to Nashe if he had studied him. As it is, the only allusion which seems to show any knowledge of Rabelais' works is in the Almond for a Parrot, the connexion of which with Nashe is very doubtful, and even this is vague and somewhat incorrect.⁸⁴

To my mind two writers could hardly be more unlike in all essentials than Rabelais and Nashe. The one was, above all things, a man of clear and original intellect, who in the guise of jest put forward new and definite schemes of life and thought; who attacked the foolish and the false most of all when it was conventionally regarded as wise and as true. He was never without understanding of the things which he derided; he knew them as well as the best of their defenders; but on all matters, great and small, he seems to have thought for himself, and the views which he expressed were independent of the society in which he lived. And for this reason he has a place in the history of thought as well as in that of literature. But with Nashe it was far otherwise. For all his wit and cleverness his outlook on life seems to have been purely conventional: to him all was good that was praised in the pulpit, all was bad that was blamed. Not once do we find him doubting that what was generally accepted in the circles in which he moved, was, and must be, the eternal truth: not once, in however trifling a matter, does he seem to have thought for himself. This, of course, makes him none the less important or interesting as a man of letters, for intellect and literary skill are, and have always been, totally independent of one another, but it does prevent us from regarding him as in any appreciable degree a disciple of Rabelais.

And yet if Nashe had read Rabelais, would he, being as he was, have understood him better or otherwise than did most of his contemporaries? Would Rabelais have been to him anything more than a mere ribald jester with a knack of picturesque language? And if not, what form would imitation of him have taken?

It is indeed hard to say. But even though intentional following might have left no recognizable trace, there would, I think, surely be other signs if Nashe had even once read Rabelais' work. It is too full of those quaint scraps of out-of-the-way learning in which he seems to have taken especial delight, for him not to have borrowed from it largely if he had known it at all.

Taking it as a whole, the reading of Nashe was probably very much that of those university men of his day who were clever and witty without having any real bent towards scholarship, or aptitude for serious study. At the same time it is clear that he held learning in honour, and desired that his work should have some appearance of it. Harvey's ridicule of his ostentation in decking out Pierce Penilesse with marginal quotations of the most commonplace character seems to have wounded him. He is at pains to explain in his Strange News the purpose of these annotations,⁸⁵ and is even driven by Harvey's sneers to the incredible assertion that he had read more good poets through than Gabriel had ever heard of.⁸⁶

But, so far at least as his writings were concerned, learning was to Nashe of use chiefly as a means of embellishing the products of his native wit, and therefore he seems to have valued it in so far as it was out of the way, curious, or picturesque, rather than for its real importance. That he desired to be regarded as a scholar seems to be clear from the way in which, when making use of his borrowed scraps, he does his best to create an impression that they are merely chance gleanings from his own full stores of knowledge. When the writer from whom he borrows has given classical authority for a statement, Nashe repeats this, even laying stress on it. Thus he tells us how Cleopatra was slain ‘according to Xiphilinus iudgment’,⁸⁷ and his readers would, no doubt, fancy that he had read Xiphilinus, unless they chanced to discover that he had borrowed the whole passage out of Stephen Gosson, who considerately gave his authority in the margin.⁸⁸ So too with his citation of Columella,⁸⁹ borrowed⁹⁰ from Erasmus, in the Terrors of the Night, and of Apuleius, Syrianus, ‘the Danish history,’ Basilius, ‘Marcus Cherronesius,’ Porphirius, Proclus, and many others in the discussion of demons in Pierce Penilesse,⁹¹ where Nashe's parade of the authorities from whom the original compiler of that discussion had gathered his material is only equalled by his reticence concerning the original compiler himself.

But it is idle to insist upon a characteristic of Nashe's work which can escape no attentive reader. Everywhere we meet with the same thing, an endeavour to appear learned, with little real learning behind it. I do not mean to say that this shows any great moral delinquency on Nashe's part. To attempt to give one's work an air of learning is a literary artifice just as any other, and there is no reason, so far as I can see, why a man should be blamed for trying to appear well-read, more than for trying to appear wise or witty.

On the charge of plagiarism Nashe cannot of course altogether be acquitted—but who of the Elizabethans can? After all, most of his borrowings consist merely of scraps taken in order to embellish work of a totally different class. Of the more serious kind of theft, the incorporation into one's own work—without acknowledgement—of large portions of the work of another writer who is dealing with the same subject, the only example which I have found is the use of the Isagoge of Pictorius in Pierce Penilesse. We must also remember that plagiarism seems to have been considered much less reprehensible than it is at present,⁹² and that certain kinds of borrowing were not considered blameworthy at all. It seems to have been considered as quite permissible to translate,⁹³ though no doubt a really honest man would mention the name of the original writer; and it seems to have been thought that there was no need to acknowledge indebtedness for anything which was not original with the writer from whom it was taken. In one or other of these two categories practically all of Nashe's borrowings would be included. We need not be too ready to accuse him of literary dishonesty, but on the other hand we should beware of attributing to him a scholarship to which he had no real claim.

If we inquire what was Nashe's direct acquaintance with the classics, we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that, apart from what he must have learnt at school and at the University, it was very little. It seems indeed to have been practically limited to Ovid, a play of Plautus, the Epistles of Horace, and perhaps some plays of Terence. Even these of course he would have read, at least partially, in his school days, but there seems to be evidence of his having studied them in later life. I see no reason to think that he read Pliny in the original, many as are the passages which are to be traced ultimately to him, or that his knowledge of Cicero is more than what any one with a good sixteenth-century education would be likely to retain from his school years. Of Greek there seems no reason to suppose that he knew more than a few words.

Nor does there appear to be any indication of an acquaintance with modern foreign languages. The use in conversation of scraps of French, Italian, or Spanish was a common affectation of the time, and every one who frequented the society of men of fashion would know the ordinary forms of salutation in the chief languages of Europe, together probably with a few exclamations and oaths. Of more knowledge than this I can find no satisfactory evidence, and I cannot help thinking that if Nashe had had any acquaintance with languages he would have been careful to apprise us of the fact.

It may be interesting to conclude this brief account of Nashe's reading by a few words as to the extent of his whole debt to some of his favourite writers. Of classical authors Ovid is by far the most frequently used, there being from him about a hundred quotations, thus distributed: Amores 27; Metamorphoses 23; Tristia 18; Heroides 15; Ars Amatoria 11; Remedia Amoris 4; Fasti 2. The numbers, it must be insisted, are merely approximate and intended to give no more than some vague idea of the comparative debt to the various works. In many cases the phrase used was widely current, and Nashe would have known it if he had never opened a volume of Ovid in his life.⁹⁴ On the other hand his indebtedness to the Metamorphoses cannot be measured by his actual quotations, for he constantly refers to stories therein contained. Such allusions, however, I have perforce left out of count, for many of the stories are of course to be found in other classical writers besides Ovid, to say nothing of the moderns.

Next to Ovid comes Horace, whose Epistles are quoted some twenty times. The Odes are, as we should expect, much less often cited, in fact only four times in all.

One can perhaps hardly omit all mention of Vergil in this connexion, but it is somewhat surprising to find only about a dozen quotations from him, as against the hundred odd from Ovid. Of these, six come from the Eclogues and six from the Aeneid.⁹⁵

The only other writer from whom the quotations are at all frequent is Terence. In his case, however, there is even more difficulty than usual in deciding what should count as an actual quotation and what as merely one of those odds and ends of Latin in common use. Plautus, save in Lenten Stuff, has left very little trace.

Of the prose authors of Latin, Pliny the elder is the authority for a large number of ‘facts’ of natural history, but for obvious reasons we cannot assume that Nashe had any direct acquaintance with his work.

There are some seven passages for which Nashe may be indebted to Aulus Gellius, but even though in one case⁹⁶ his name is mentioned, I should be inclined to question whether Nashe had much first-hand acquaintance with his work.

Among modern authors the most surprising amount of borrowing is from the De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum of Cornelius Agrippa, to which Nashe appears to be indebted more than seventy times—and some of the borrowings are passages of several lines in length, containing a number of distinct facts. It is hardly too much to say that the greater part of Nashe's apparent learning is transferred wholesale from Agrippa's work.

If we except the long borrowing from Pictorius in Pierce Penilesse, and the similes taken from the Parabolae of Erasmus, nearly all of which occur in the Anatomy of Absurdity, we find that the book which comes next to Agrippa in the use made of it by Nashe is a work of a very different character, namely Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, which is used some twenty-five times at least. If, however, we remember the difference in size of the two books, we see that this occasional use of Hakluyt, which, besides, only occurs in Nashe's two latest works, is very different from the systematic gutting of the De Incertitudine Scientiarum.

Enough has been said of Nashe's other points of indebtedness to modern authors. In no case are the borrowings comparable in number to those from Agrippa, nor do they extend through so many years. It is possible that there may be one or two other books which Nashe kept by him in a similar way, and to which he often referred. I am inclined to suspect that there was at least one, which may have dealt chiefly with natural history, for there are a good number of borrowings from the classics, especially from Pliny and from Aristotle, the immediate source of which I have not traced. I may mention the Brief Collection … of Strange and Memorable Things gathered out of the Cosmography of Sebastian Münster, 1572 and 1574, as a possible source of many scraps, but I have failed to discover any certain evidence of its use. Another work to which I have referred in the notes is Henry Smith's religious treatise called God's Arrow against Atheists, one chapter of which is devoted to Mahomet and his religion: from this Nashe may have gathered several stray facts. But in the case of this and a number of other books mentioned in the notes actual proof of borrowing is difficult to obtain.

Finally, what did Nashe know of English literature before his own time? Very little, I think; but probably not less than the majority of his contemporaries. Chaucer is mentioned eight times, but Nashe nowhere shows any real knowledge of his works. Gower and Lydgate are once named, together with Chaucer, as men who lived ‘vnder the tyranny of ignorance’.⁹⁷ The prose romances of the type of Morte Arthur, Huon of Bordeaux and The Four Sons of Aymon, and the verse romance of Bevis of Hampton are contemptuously dismissed as out of date, or quoted for the purpose of ridicule. Beyond this, there is, I think, except for Skelton's Tunning of Elinor Rumming⁹⁸ and Bale's Acts of the English Votaries, no reference to any English literature earlier than the middle of the sixteenth century.

Notes

1. Lengthy sections devoted to the subject will be found in the works on Rhetoric. Cf. Wilson, Art of Rhet., ed. Mair, pp. 188-97. Puttenham, Art of Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 247, says: ‘As well to a good maker and Poet as to an excellent perswader in prose, the figure of Similitude is very necessary, by which we not onely bewtifie our tale, but also very much inforce and inlarge it. I say inforce because no one thing more preuaileth with all ordinary iudgements than perswasion by similitude.’

2. Cf. [William Harrison] Woodward, [Desiderius] Erasmus concerning [The Aim and Method of] Education, [Cambridge: University Press] 1904, p. 126, note 3; J. L. Vives, [Libri XII.] de disciplinis, [Hi de corruptis artibus doctissimi viri notis, illi de traendis disciplinis cujusdam studios; Oxoniensis annotationibus i illustrati. Cum indice, etc.,] ed. [Lugduni Batavorum] 1636, p. 488, and, as to the formation and use of such collections, Erasmus, De [duplici] Copia, [verborum ac rerum comentarii duo,] the sections in pt. ii, on ‘Loci communes’, ‘Ratio colligendi exempla’, &c. Erasmus' own Parabolae or Similia is an example of such a work.

3. See iii. 175. 34, & c. [of the present edition]

4. Such a proceeding is perhaps conceivable in the case of one or two authors such as Ovid or Cornelius Agrippa, whose work he knew particularly well.

5. With ‘supra’, not ‘ultra’; but it is with the latter word that it has been generally quoted, at least since the time of Erasmus, who thus gives it in his Adagia.

6. Much material for the study of the subject is to be found in Prof. Foster Watson's English Grammar Schools to 1660, Camb. Univ. Press, 1908, but, useful as the work is, it may, I think, fairly be said rather to show the difficulty and complexity of the matter than to render it simple.

7. By Leonhard Culman, ‘Crailssheymensis’, i. e., I suppose, of Crailsheim in Würtemberg. Prof. Foster Watson gives its date as 1543 (Eng. Gr. Schools, p. 358). It was being printed in England before 1584, when Bynneman made over the patent to the Stationers' Company for the benefit of the poorer members of that company (op. cit., p. 359).

8. Said to be the work of Evaldus Gallus, a schoolmaster of Weert in Holland, in the second half of the sixteenth century. It was used in England in 1583 (Eng. Gr. Schools, p. 348 note).

9. I follow his biographer F. Buisson in the form of the name: he is often called Castalio. According to the Nouv. Biog. Générale his proper name was Châteillon, which he latinized to Castalion.

10. The ‘Sancte Socrates’ of iii. 66. 2-3, which I had not found when the notes were printed, is from the Colloquia (see Addenda and Corrigenda), but taken alone this is of little value as evidence.

11. Those of Heggendorff, Macropedius, and Verepaeus were all printed in England at various times, and were therefore presumably popular.

12. See iii. 64. 10-11.

13. See Prof. Foster Watson, Eng. Gram. Schools to 1660, pp. 441, 444.

14. See i. 319. 15-16.

15. All these numbers are to be taken as merely approximate. They will generally be found to be somewhat less than the number of references given in the notes, as in counting I have omitted a certain number of cases where the borrowing seems doubtful.

16. See especially note on i. 21. 11.

17. See i. 43. 8-11; 46. 9-11; 47. 12-22, and 29-32.

18. References to stories told by Macrobius will be found at i. 174. 12-13; 214. 26, &c.; ii. 88. 24-5. In all cases, however, the story was well known, and there seems no reason for thinking that Nashe took it direct from the original source.

19. Two from the Ars Amatoria (i. 7. 11; 10. 34-5), and one from the Tristia (20. 12-13). All are hackneyed.

20. See i. 16. 14-19; 33. 27-9.

21. See i. 47. 1-9.

22. Barnaby Rich, in his Alarm to England, 1578, makes special mention of the popularity of this work, which is studied by those who desire ‘to be curious in cauilling, propounding captious questions, thereby to shewe a singularitie of their wisedomes’ (Barker's ed., sig. G2: cf. long extract including this passage in Brit. Bibl. i. 510-11). It is an interesting question whether Nashe used the original Latin of the De Incertitudine or James Sandford's translation. That he did occasionally use the latter is shown by the quotation at ii. 141. 20-2 of a passage from Sandford's dedication to the Earl of Norfolk, which of course does not appear in the Latin. In many cases also the correspondence in language with Sandford's version is too close to be accidental. On the other hand in Summer's Last Will he quotes in Latin a number of proverbs and sayings given by Agrippa, in a form closely resembling that in which they appear in the De Incertitudine (see especially ll. 285-6, 751-5, 992-3, 1146, 1148 of the play; also note on i. 261. 4-5). It seems on the whole probable that he generally used the English, but occasionally, perhaps when this was not available, turned to the Latin. It may be remarked that Sandford's dedication to the Earl of Norfolk only appears in the first edition (1569), not in that of 1575. It must therefore have been the former which he used.

23. See notes on i. 3. 1; 11. 22-8.

24. See i. 39. 32-3.

25. Quoted and ridiculed at i. 26. 17-32.

26. See i. 7. 10.

27. See iii. 93. 26-32.

28. See iii. 314. 25-9.

29. See iii. 320. 1-4.

30. I am indebted to Mr. Charles Whibley for drawing my attention to a copy of Phaer's translation of The seven first bookes of the Eneidos of Virgill, 1558, now in the British Museum (C. 56. e. 2), on the verso of the title-page of which is the name Thomas Nashe. This name is at the top of the page and is followed by three words—partially cut away by the binder—which may, I think, be ‘hunc possed[it] librũ’. A note in the book declares this to be the signature of the satirist, but I think that the point must be regarded as open to doubt. The writing cannot be said particularly to resemble that of either of his other signatures now known, and the name was not uncommon. In any case the form of the inscription—if I have read it correctly—allows us to suppose, and even suggests, that it was not written by the person to whom it refers.

31. In the original ‘Empedocus’. I treated this as a misprint, but it is quite possible that it may have been Nashe's mistake.

32. See iii. 332. 33-4.

33. See i. 173. 25, &c.; 185. 7-8; 188. 29-30; 189. 31-3, and probably 206. 28.

34. See note on iii. 254. 670-256. 735. The translation seems not to be extant.

35. Namely at 186. 6 Fraus sublimi …, see Politica, ed. 1589, l. iii, c. 11, p. 99: at 193. 28-9 Multi famam …, Pol., l. i, c. 5, p. 16—the reference ‘Plin. lib. iii. Epist.’ is given: and at 211. 26 Nam, si foras hostem …, Pol. l. iv, c. 9, p. 143 (si foris …).

36. See below, on the Unfortunate Traveller.

37. See i. 193. 32, & c.

38. See i. 306. 28-30.

39. See i. 176. 18-19.

40. As I have stated above, p. 118, note 8, there are certain borrowings in this play which seem to indicate the use of the Latin text of Agrippa, but there is one which is certainly from the English; see note on iii. 234. 30-3; here the Latin has ‘Iam vero et celebri triumviratu (narrante Plinio) experimento compertum est, avium cantus depicto dracone cohibitos’. Nashe perhaps had his note-books with him and found a Latin text at Croydon.

41. See iii. 254. 670, & c.

42. See iii. 277. 1380-2.

43. See iii. 240. 226; 242. 292-4; 264. 976.

44. See iii. 242. 295-6; 252. 594; 265. 991-2.

45. See i. 317. 11-12.

46. So far, at least, as I have been able to discover.

47. See i. 259. 32, & c.

48. See i. 330. 9.

49. See i. 350. 26-8.

50. Immediately before this we have a reference to Columella, which probably was taken by way of the Parabolae of Erasmus. Another passage (i. 357. 32-3) may be from the same work.

51. See i. 351. 9-11.

52. See i. 309. 1.

53. See ii. 302. 25-6.

54. See especially note on ii. 298. 23-4. Also 236. 19; 274. 6-7; and perhaps 245. 35, with which cf. Politica, ed. 1589, l. ii, c. 10, p. 50 ‘Remota Justitia, quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?’

55. See ii. 238. 21-2.

56. See ii. 88. 9, &c.; 97. 35, &c.: cf. notes on 64. 6-10; 90. 14-15.

57. Especially to the Sermones; but most of the passages cited are frequently referred to in theological literature of the time.

58. See Addenda to notes on ii. 116. 15-25 and 119. 1. Unfortunately I did not discover these borrowings until after the volume of notes was printed, and I have not been able to read through the Defensative as carefully as I should wish. It is possible that Nashe knew it when he wrote the Terrors of the Night, which contains one or two passages which may have been suggested by it.

59. See iv. 295, note 1.

60. So it is called in the D. N. B.

61. See iii. 37. 15-16.

62. See iii. 20. 24-7.

63. See iii. 30. 25-6 and 31. 25. In the first case the wording is the same in Froissart (‘Tudor Trans.’ i. 310) and Holinshed: in the second Froissart (i. 290), or rather Berners, spells ‘Gobyn a Grace’, which is nearer to the form used by Nashe than either of those given by Holinshed. The name ‘ap Hannikin’, which Nashe joins with Gobin a Grace, may have been suggested by that of Hanekyn Francoys, ‘a lewde felowe of Colayne on the ryver of Ryne,’ mentioned by Froissart (ii. 18 and elsewhere).

64. See iii. 19. 35, & c.

65. Cf. ii. 238. 26-7 and note.

66. See iii. 55. 33, & c.

67. See iii. 22. 34-5 and note.

68. See iii. 175. 34, & c.

69. We find, for example, only a single passage from C. Agrippa (iii. 221. 6-9), and that probably a reminiscence, not a quotation.

70. See iii. 172. 17-20.

71. See iii. 150. 4-5; 173. 8-9; 186. 27-8.

72. See iii. 199. 9-11.

73. See iii. 185. 12-15.

74. See iii. 187. 8, & c.

75. See index under ‘Books mentioned’.

76. For example the story told of Hippocrates at iii. 22. 14-17, corresponds closely in wording with a passage in La Primaudaye's French Academy, but it is quite likely that the same thing may occur in several other places, and I can find no other evidence that Nashe made any use of La Primaudaye's work.

77. See D. N. B. Similar statements have been made by a number of writers.

78. The case for regarding Nashe as a disciple and imitator of Rabelais has been very well put by Mr. Charles Whibley in an article entitled ‘Rabelais en Angleterre’ in the Revue des Études rabelaisiennes, vol. i, 1903. Mr. Whibley shows clearly that there was much in common between the genius of Nashe and that of Rabelais, and that there are marked points of similarity between the styles of the two writers, but he does not seem to me to succeed in proving actual imitation. The passages which he quotes from Nashe are indeed perfectly in the style of Rabelais, but in no single instance can one say that such and such a phrase or idea of the English writer was borrowed from any particular phrase or idea of the French. To me at least there appears to be no reason for denying that the resemblances which we find in the work of the two writers, may be due merely to their similar bent of mind. See note on iii. 193. 2-3 in the Addenda.

79. See i. 259. 32, & c.

80. Sig. B 3, Wks., ed. Grosart, i. 272-3: ‘When the sweet Youth haunted Aretine, and Rabelays, the two monstrous wittes of their languages, who so shaken with the furious feauers of the One: or so attainted with the French Pockes of the other?’

81. See iii. 152. 8-9. Nashe is talking of the ‘huge woords’ which he means to employ in Lenten Stuff; but the chief characteristic of Pietro's style would seem to have been rather his elaborate and often strained metaphors than a use of uncommon or coined words.

82. See note on i. 242. 15.

83. Had it been only fantastic names which might be applied to Gabriel Harvey.

84. See iii. 341. 26-8. A possible—but, I think, very improbable—case of reminiscence of a passage of Rabelais is pointed out in the Addenda, see note there on iii. 193. 2-3. It may be remarked that the use at iii. 34. 15 and iii. 157. 34 of the word ‘Gargantuan’ is no evidence at all of any direct knowledge of Rabelais, for it seems to have been in current use. There is some evidence of an English work, probably a chapbook, dealing with Gargantua; see notes of the commentators on As You Like It, III. ii. 238. Laneham in 1575 enumerates a ‘Gargantua’ among Captain Cox's books, and a ‘historie of Gargantua’ was entered in the Stationers' Register in December, 1594. One or both of these may have been a translation from Rabelais, or, which seems to me equally possible, a translation of the Grandes et Inestimables Chroniques du grant et enorme Geant Gargantua, which existed at least as early as 1532, and the connexion of which with Rabelais is very doubtful.

85. See i. 307. 34, & c.

86. See i. 315. 29-30.

87. See i. 17. 8.

88. See Add. notes at end of vol. iv.

89. See i. 350. 23.

90. Probably, if not certainly.

91. See i. 227-38.

92. Of course plenty of charges of plagiarism were brought by writers against each other; Nashe himself refers to a theft from his Pierce Penilesse (iii. 132. 26-9).

93. But even translation might sometimes be regarded as reprehensible; cf. Martin's Epitome, ed. Petheram, p. 8: ‘He [i.e. Dr. Bridges] hath vsed such varietie of lerning, that very often he hath translated out of one mans writing, 6. or 7. pages together, note here a newe founde manner of booke-making.’

94. Many are in Lily's Grammar.

95. I omit of course the use made of the Aeneid in Dido.

96. See iii. 242. 295-6.

97. See iii. 322. 22-3.

98. See iii. 252. 588-9.