rather an unkind word), such as his _Lenten Stuff_, eulogistic of the herrings which were the staple commodity of his native coast, and a curious book called _The Unfortunate Traveller_, dealing with the grand tour, and containing among other things the well-known romance (for romance it would seem to be) of Surrey the poet and his Geraldine. Where Nash stands eminent among the writers of the time is in his faculty of boisterous and burlesque abuse, which, in his famous lampoon upon Harvey, _Have with you to Saffron Walden_ (Harvey's birthplace), displayed itself in a manner not easy to parallel elsewhere in English. It is very hard to give in very brief space an account of the Martin Marprelate matter, yet without some such account extracts from it must be hardly intelligible. It began about the year 1588, chiefly owing to the action of a certain Reverend Nicholas Udall, a puritan divine who struck into the controversy between the Episcopal and Presbyterian parties in the Church, and embittered it by the use of language so violent that he himself was imprisoned and his printer's press seized. This printer, Waldegrave, enraged thereat, lent his art to members of the puritan sect even more violent than Udall (their exact identity is matter of controversy), and a fire of pamphlets was opened by them, the earliest being called _The Epistle_ and _The Epitome_. In the first place, Dean Bridges of Salisbury and Bishop Cooper of Winchester, then other dignitaries, were assailed with real vigour and ability, but with the most unscrupulous partisanship, and in a dialect which for extravagance of abusive language had not been surpassed in the heat of the earlier Reformation controversies, and has scarcely been approached since. The partisans of the Church were fully equal to the occasion; and a counter fire of pamphlets, some of which are attributed with great probability to Nash, and others with hardly less to the Oxford dramatist and euphuist Lyly, was returned. The heat of the controversy lasted chiefly through three years--1588, 1589, and 1590; but it may be said in the widest sense to have endured for nearly seven--from 1586 to 1593, when Penry and Barrow, the supposed chiefs of the Martinists, were executed. Of the style of this singular controversy the extract will, I trust, give a sufficient idea. As to its matter, it is difficult to be more precise than this: that the object of the Martinist pamphleteers was to decry episcopacy by every possible description of personal abuse, applied to the holders and the defenders of the episcopal office, and that the object of their opponents of the same class (for men like Cooper and Bridges, still more like Whitgift and Hooker, stand in an entirely different category) was not so much to defend that office as to fling back in double measure the abuse upon 'Martin,' as the generic name went, and upon his known or supposed embodiments and partisans.