With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, or Nashe, made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the history of Elizabethan literature. The son of "William Nash, minister" (not improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk in November, 1567. The Christian names of his brothers and sisters, Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are of the Biblical sort favoured by "the Brethren". Nash made no claim to the title "gentleman" then used in the heraldic sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar" (at Oxford "servitor") or Lady Margaret's Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, and was in residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 he was in London, a literary hack, employed, for example, to write an "Introduction" to Greene's "Menaphon". He addresses the students of both Universities in his irrepressibly rattling way, and it is hardly possible to doubt that in a long passage he rails at the unfortunate Kyd in his capacities as playwright and translator from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed contemporary literature and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings of Gabriel Harvey. With him Nash later had a war of pamphlets, the best known is "Have with You to Saffron Walden," containing a full answer to the eldest son of the Halter-maker (1596). The pamphlets are only of interest for their personal hints: the feud arose from a slighting allusion by Greene to Harvey's parentage ("Quip for an Upstart Courtier"). Nash took up the cudgels (as his weapons of wit may be called) for Greene; Harvey pursued Greene's memory beyond the tomb, and Government at last put an end to the publication of the pamphlets. Nash and Marlowe worked together at the play of "Dido," mainly based on the "Æneid" of Virgil, with an opening scene in un-Virgilian bad taste, and highly unedifying to the players, "the Children of her Majesty's Chapel The play is in blank verse, usually better than Nash's own in his "Summer's Last Will and Testament". Much of this is in Nash's hasty prose; a blank verse tirade in praise of dogs is amusing:-- To come to speech, they have it questionless, Although we understand them not so well, They bark as good old Saxon as may be. In 1597, Nash was imprisoned for a play "The Isle of Dogs". It is impossible to enumerate his tracts, of which his turbulent prose satire, "Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil," is the most spirited. His "Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton" (1594) is a crude anticipation of "Gil Blas," and the novel of unscrupulous wandering adventurers, and contains the feigned story of the loves of Surrey and his Geraldine, which was taken to be historical. Nash lived a scrambling life, a bookseller's hack, destitute of patrons, and died about 1601. For the advance of the drama, despite his play-writing, Nash did nothing. Marlowe.