"Do I talke of any counterfeit birds, or hearbes or stones?... This I will proudly boast ... that the vaine which I have ... is of my own begetting and cals no man father in England but myselfe, neither Euphues, nor Tarlton, nor Greene. "Not Tarlton nor Greene but have beene contented to let my simple judgment overrule them in some matters of wit. Euphues I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge, and I then thought it was _ipse ille_: it may be excellent still for ought I know, but I lookt not on it this ten yeare: but to imitate it I abhorre."[268] His vocabulary is very rich; he has always a variety of words at his disposal and uses often two or three the better to impress our minds with the idea in his own. He coins at need new words or fetches them from classical or foreign languages. He does not do this in an off-hand way, but on purpose and wilfully; he possessed much of that curious care for and delight in words which is one of the characteristics of the men of the Renaissance. To deal with words was in itself a pleasure for them; they liked to mould, to adopt, to combine, to invent them. Word painting delighted them; Nash has an extreme fondness for it, and satirical and comical as he is, he often astonishes us by the poetic gracefulness of his combinations of words. In this as in many other particulars he imitates, _longe sequens_, the master he seems to have admired above others, Rabelais, who, in the tempestuous roll of his diverse waters, sometimes washes up on to the sand pearls fit to adorn the crown of any lyrical poet. Fishes appear in Nash's otherwise unpoetical prose as "the sea's finny freeholders;" the inhabitants of a port town do not sow corn, "their whole harvest is by sea;" they plough "the glassy fieldes of Thetis." He has an instinctive hatred for abstract terms; he wants expressive words, words that shine, that breathe, that live. Instead of saying that Henry III. _granted_ a charter and certain privileges in a particular year of his _reign_, he will write that "he _cheard up their blouds_ with two charters more, and in Anno 1262 and forty-five of his _courte keeping_, he permitted them to wall in their towne."[269] The pleasure of replacing stale, commonplace expressions by rare, picturesque, live ones, and in lieu of a plain sentence to give an allegorical substitute, has so much attraction for Nash, that clear-sighted as he is, he cannot always avoid the ordinary defects of this particular style, defects which he has in common with many of his contemporaries, not excluding Shakespeare himself, namely, obscurity and sometimes bad taste.