_The Unfortunate Traveller_ is of much less importance than the other two. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of its invention or improvement of the fable of "Surrey and Geraldine"; more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of historical material--the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders--into something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more for something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in _Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_ a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_ is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_, and _facetiæ_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than _The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectæ membra _novellæ_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faint vague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almost completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque" manner, it is abortive and only half organised.