Puritan Discipline Tracts. AN ALMOND FOR A PARROT; BEING A REPLY TO MARTIN MAR-PRELATE. Re-printed from the Black Letter Edition, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES. LONDON: JOHN PETHERAM, 71, CHANCERY LANE. 1846. INTRODUCTION. Although I cannot at this time bring together positive and undoubted evidence of the authorship of the following tract, (because the materials are at present inaccessible to me,) at some future period, in the Introduction to one of his accredited productions, I hope to place the fact beyond the reach of cavil or question, that Thomas Nash, to whom public fame has given it, was the author. Nash was of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and took his degree of B.A. in 1585. He is supposed to have quitted the university in some disgrace about 1586, but of the cause we are entirely ignorant. The anonymous author of a tract called “Polymanteia,” printed in 1595, thus alludes to it: “Cambridge, make thy two children friends; thou hast been unkind to one [Nash], to wean him before his time, and too fond upon the other [Gabriel Harvey], to keep him so long without preferment; the one is ancient and of small reading; the other is young and full of wit.” Nash himself speaks of his beardless years, in Pierce Penniless; and Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierce’s Supererogation, 1592, calls him “a gosling of the printing house;” and in another place “a proper young man;” and elsewhere, “a young man of the greenest spring, as beardless in judgment as in face:” so that he must have taken his degree of B.A. early in life, and we know that he never proceeded Master of Arts. It would appear from the Introduction to the following tract that Nash had visited Italy. Mr. Collier, in his Introduction to Nash’s Pierce Penniless [Shakspeare Soc. 1842], says, “We find him [Nash] in London in 1587, in which year he wrote a very amusing and clever introductory epistle to a tract by the celebrated Robert Greene, called ‘Menaphon,’ afterwards better known by the name of ‘Greene’s Arcadia,’ the title it bore in the later impressions. This seems to have been Nash’s earliest appearance in the character of an author” [p. x. xi.], then adding in a note, “We take the date of ‘Greene’s Menaphon,’ 1587, from the edition of that author’s ‘Dramatic Works,’ by the Rev. A. Dyce.” Mr. Collier apparently had forgotten that he had himself stated some years before the fact of the Arcadia having been printed in 1587, “because in Greene’s _Euphues_, his _Censure to Philautus_, of the same date, it is mentioned as already in print.” [Hist. English Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 150.]